Word Power

Some words whose meanings I have learned this month:

belicose

adj. Warlike / hostile in manner / temperament

bumptious

adj. arrogant; pushy; offensively self-assertive; conceited

de facto

In reality or fact

de facto standard: Accepted by custom, convention or common practice

dendroglyph

noun. Tree carving, often geometric, found in Australia and the Chatham Islands

nonce

noun. Single occasion; the present call or purpose

pellucid

adj. Admitting the passage of light; transparent or translucent.

vertiginous

adj. Having / causing a whirling sensation; whirling; turning; revolving; liable to falling; affected with vertigo; giddy; dizzy

Computer Science meets Pornography

Original Image from Amazon.com

I recently wrote about IT pros using language in a different way from ‘normal’ people.

I’ve seen it again.

Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror, wrote a controversial article about something called, “NP-Complete”.  What is it? I must be the wrong kind of geek, because I couldn’t make neither head nor tail of the whole business. As far as I could make out, it is some arcane computer science thing that explains why travelling salesmen rarely see their families at the weekends.

One thing that Jeff mentioned does seem to explain a lot:

NP-Complete problems are like hardcore pornography.

Intriguing.

At the end of the article, Jeff asked for examples of reader’s, “favourite NP-complete cheat”. One of the few responses that actually answered gave a list. With no hint of titter nor smirk he including:

• Simulated annealing
• The great deluge

Frankly, the mind boggles!

Having read the article, I am still fairly naive (about both the porn and the NP thing). One thing’s for sure:

Either computer scientists need to get out more, or I really am the wrong kind of geek.

Definition: War

A curious game: all the players set out to win, but all are guaranteed loose.

Definition: Maybe

The maybe keyword is of type int and evaluates to 1 or 0 with equal probability, 50%.

Definition: Computer

A device for doing logical things in illogical ways.

 Thanks to Gideon for this one.

Definition: Kaizen

Yesterday, I was reading the preface to the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, and came across the word “Kaizen” for the first time.

Definition: Entropy

Entropy is the reasons that shoelaces to spontaneously undo themselves, trip you up and make you fall flat on your face.

Entropy is also the reason that shoelaces never do themselves back up again.

Definition: Acronym

A Contrived Reduction Of Nomenclature Yielding Mnemonics

If only I had come up with this myself.

Definition: Dirt

The stuff that people are made from.

Definition: Blog

To clog up the internet.

(According to my wife, when I told her I was blogging)