A door taken off its hinges, then a mind taken off its hinges, then a compliment. The slow journey of a metaphor that still works because of the hinge it pictures.
Blog posts in "Word of the Day"
14 posts found
How a Trojan prince's name became a verb for browbeating. The seventeenth-century London gangs that stole it, and what hectoring still names that argument and anger do not.
An old word for an old kind of joy — where frolic comes from, why its k quietly fell off, and what the word still protects that its more serious cousins do not.
The small doorway that swallows an afternoon — where the phrase comes from, why the internet turned it into a verb, and how to tell a good rabbit hole from a bad one.
On the engineering philosophy of using two independent safeguards for the same failure — and why redundancy is sometimes wisdom, not waste.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — how language models learn to reach outside themselves for facts, and why it matters that they do.
A sceptical metaphor for what large language models are doing when they sound like they understand us — where the phrase came from, and why it still stings.
The small wrongness of an almost-human face — why it unsettles us, where the term comes from, and why the valley is no longer confined to robotics labs.
The experience of the self dissolving — what it is, where the term comes from, what neuroscience is starting to say about it, and why it matters.
The hypnotic curves traced by two sinusoids plotted against each other — and why mix engineers stare at them to keep stereo images honest.
A cognitive theory of autism that frames it not as a deficit, but as attention flowing in a single, deep channel rather than many parallel ones.
Flattering the powerful at the cost of the truth — an ancient corrosive habit, and its strange comeback as a technical term in AI alignment.
The three rotational axes of any rigid body moving through space — tilt, nod, turn — and why these three nautical words ended up running half the modern world.
The sense of the internal state of the body — how the brain perceives signals from inside you, and why it matters for emotion, intuition, and health.