Shibboleth

A shibboleth is a word or phrase that can be used to determine a speaker's social or regional origins.

I remember my father once telling me that Germans asked people to pronounce the word Kirche, which apparently those who are not native Germans find difficult to prounounce.

Although I've known the concept for a long time, I never knew the term that described the concept - and learnt it while watching an episode of The West Wing

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Iconoclast

The iconoclasts were people who went around (in Ancient Greece, probably) destroying religious statues and icons. Nowadays it refers to people who challenge established dogma or convention.

The word has always had a special resonance for me - Although I cannot imagine myself in running around Ancient Greece in toga and thongs pulling down statues, it's nice that there is a Greek sounding word for being just a little sceptical at times.

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Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law is the observation which was made in the 1990s that as an online discussion or thread grows, the probability of a comparison being made to Hitler or the Nazis approaches 1.

I was reminded of Godwin's law this morning while listening to a Background Briefing podcast about Lord Monckton who compared those who accept climate change as Fascists (and made references to 1930s Germany).

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Borsuk-Ulam Theorem

The Borsuk-Ulam Theorem states that every continuous function from a n-sphere into Euclidean n-space maps maps some pair of antipodal points onto the same point.

A nice illustration of this (and the example that made this theorem interesting to me), is that at any point in time, there are two points exactly opposite each other (antipodal) on the earths surface that have exactly the same temperature and atmospheric pressure.

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Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the phenomenon where people who are less skilled at something tend to overestimate their abilities and people who are more skilled tend to underestimate their abilities.

This is one of the reasons why I think it is very unfair when people ask me in an interview to assess my programming ability.

A lot has been written about the Dunning-Kruger Effect and its role in the climate debate.

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Banach-Tarski paradox

The Banach-Tarski paradox is a mathematical theorem that states that a solid sphere can be cut into a finite number of pieces which can then be put together again in a different way to yield two spheres of identical size.

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Milgram Experiment

The Milgram Experiment was a psychological experiment that looked at how people responded to authority. It was conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University.

I first heard about this experiment after the Abu Ghraib incident during the Iraq war.

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Skeuomorph

A skeuomorph is an object that retains design features that are no longer needed. A typical example would be pillars on the front of a building where the pillars are no longer needed for structural integrity.

In user interfaces, we sometimes see screens that are mocked up to look like antique screens or the interfaces they replace (e.g. a radio).

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