Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

lansquenet (101) german gambling card game; speluncar (104) relating to a cave; maculation (105) spottedness - bit of a stretch that one; bemisted (108) in a mist. Several 'known' unkowns omitted from this list. Is all of this unknown vocabulary waking my brain up, or is Nabokov's pace really slackening?

bosquet (88) a formal planting of trees; adeling (88) NID; planchette (91) pen-holder used for automatic writing; ogival (94) curved to a point; pudibundity (95) prudery... Nabokov apparently read and wrote in English before Russian. He graduated from Cambridge. His language history is in no way comparable to Conrad's, who learnt English as an adult.

transposal (72) the putting of things in each other's place, occludent (73) NID as a noun, but thing closing something (?), rodstein (75) - spelling? - a type of stone(?), chrysoprase (78) apple green gem stone. Looks like he's running out of steam...or words.

eschatological (63) relating to the final destiny of the soul; crined (64) emblazoned with hair; technicology (64) obsolete form of 'technology'; pertussal (65) related to whooping cough; Conchologist (65) student of mollusc shells; contrapuntal (66) of or in counterpoint...This joke might go on too long, but it seems to be slowing down.

parhelia (12) false suns; facetiation (17) the making of fun; bendlet (19) a small heraldic bend; hiving (21) residing in close association...This usually only happens to me in Magyar texts.

"I knew I had to leave you before the terrible discipline you impose on your own life to save yourself from distractions took me over too; before I grew so much a part of you that I could only see through your eyes and think of Dorozs as a szanitorium made of concrete and glass, rather than as an ancient spring and an intense desire to put something that time should put right." - terrible sentence, but the essence.

"...knowing the the acceptable sounds which can appear together and at the starts and ends of words helps people decode speech. This is known in the literature as phonotactics..." - how does this interact with sound recognition: is sound recognition prior to phototactic knowledge, or does phototactic knowledge help resolve ambiguities in sound recognition?

"...it takes lots or receptive practice through recycling, spaced practice and interleaving before skills become internalised. De Jong (2005) notes that if students have to produce too soon they fall back on incorrect or incomplete knowledge, or on knowledge of sounds in their L1" - students that suddenly start speaking after years of passivity, am I one of those?

"If Hitler had had things his way, we'd just be slaves now."

"We would never have figured out that there was an opioid crisis without the data" - what else are we overlooking because we're not looking for it.

"Research has shown that, while listening, we cannot focus on both meaning and form of the language at the same time" - how did the researchers separate meaning from form?

"...I suspect that life will continue to speed up and urbanization remains the dominant force as we head toward an impending singularity." - my suspicion is that covid has taken us over that singularity, showing us that social and cultural interaction no longer requires a city.

"...in parallel with the quest for the Theory of Everything, we need to embark on a similar quest for a grand unified theory of complexity" - oxymoron?

"Unfortunately, for cities and socioeconomic systems the phase transition stimulated by the finite time singularity is from superexponential growth to stagnation and collapse" - this would have been a more interesting book, do socioeconomic systems like cities, and corporations exhibit phase transitions in a law like manner?

"We need a broad and more integrated scientific framework that encompasses a quantative, predictive, MECHANISTIC theory for understanding the relationship between human-engineered systems, both social and physical, and the "natural" environment..." - my caps: there aren't any in this book.

"By the time a company realises its condition it is often too late. Reconfiguring and reinventing become increasingly difficult and expensive...the company becomes seriously at risk and ripe for a takeover, buyout, or simply going belly-up." - invest in cities, or industries, not companies?

"As such, [cities] exude an almost laissez-faire, free wheeling ambience relative to companies, taking advantage of the innovative benefits of social interactions whether good, bad or ugly. Despite their bumbling efficiencies, cities are places of action and agents of change relative to companies, which by and large usually project an image of stasis unless they are young" - the role of companies relative to cities?

"Clearly, both approaches are needed...In the scaling laws revealed that 80-90% of their measurable characteristics are determined by their population size...the remaing 10-20% being a measure of their individuality and uniqueness, which can only be understood from detailed studies that incorporate historical, geographical, and cultural characteristics." - bring on the detailed studies!

"...the total market worth of all publically traded companies in the US...is 15% larger than the entire GDP" - GDP is a measure of activity, the market worth however is a measure of value. Governments do not have market valuations, but in most developed countries they not corporations are the dominant economic player, spending over 50% of gdp.

"sublinear scaling and economies of scale that dominate biology lead to stable bounded growth and slowing down of the pace of life, whereas superlinear scaling and increasing returns to scale that dominate socioeconomic activity lead to unbounded growth and to an accelerated pace of life." - on one hand a powerful argument that humanity has stepped beyond its biological constraints, on the other history.

"A critical aspect of this approach is that cities and businesses are complex adaptive systems and should consequently be viewed as an integrated system and not as isolated individual agents" - another dig at classical microeconomic analysis, if only he offered a worked example to show a systems approach out-predicting an agency approach.

"....the continued success of San Jose was already set well before the birth of Silicon Valley" - well before it was named Silicon Valley: Statistics might identify what needs explaining, History is still required to explain it.

"In assessing the performance of a particulat city, we therefore need to determine how well it relative performs relative to what it has accomplished just because of its population size." - this was obvious 75 pages ago.

"In a real village we are limited to a community that is imposed on us by sheer proximity resulting from its small size, whereas in a city we are freer to choose our own village" - the emerging conflict between workers and management over office and home working could be over who workers have to spend time with in the office.

"So the increase in transportation speed resulting from the marvellous innovations of the past couple of hundred years has not been used to reduce commuting time but instead has been used to increase commuting distances." - when I was living in London I remember reading articles arguing that traffic was travelling no faster in London than it had been 100 years before, because of congestion.

"We can't be in all places at all times" - he really doesn't get the internet at all, the only constraint is our attention span.

"Ironically, economists and financial analysts traditionally use Gaussian statistics in their analysis, ignoring the preponderance of fat tails and therefore correlations" - isn't there a book about this?

"the set of individuals from whom the respondent would seek personal advice or help in times of severe emotional and financial distress" - Dunbar's core social group, would 'emotional' and 'financial' even be the same set?

"Systematically having more [connectivity] per capita not only means higher wages, more patents...but also more crime and disease - and living with greater stress, anxiety and fear, and with less trust and civility" - working on line gives us one without the other.

"Compared with biological life cities haven't been around very long...So any drive toward optimality arising from incremental adaptations and feedback mechanisms as cities grow and evolve hasn't had a lot of time to settle down and and reach full fruition" - do cities grow and evolve like biological life? Do ant hills grow and evolve?