🦋 eunoia

Metaphors are slippery, like memory. But then, putting things to words is always a translation, an approximation of the thing. There’s perhaps no better reminder of that than our inability to describe the sensation of scent, its transportability, what it feels like and means to us. As Epstein suggests, the mind and memory are equally inarticulable ... See more

Some might call this concatenation of elements a “vibe”: something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose collection of ideas, concepts, things that can be identified by intuition rather than by a prescribed logic.

Iwakan is one of my favorite Japanese phrases. It consists of three Chinese characters, 違 ( i , meaning difference, deviation), 和 ( wa , meaning harmony, peace) and 感 ( kan , meaning feeling, sense), that together form a single word that loosely translates as a ‘sense of disharmony’. In daily interactions, I use the term casually when something fee... See more

“Practice” made its way into our language by way of the Greek word praktikē , meaning “active,” and the Old French pratique , which actually means “experience.”

Process, on the other hand, originates in Latin as procedere and in French as proces , which mean something more akin to “a methodical series of steps.” Those steps lead toward something, as... See more

¿cómo puede ser que, de las dos acepciones de la palabra «patético», hayamos elegido pensar siempre antes en la segunda, con todas sus connotaciones negativas, cuando necesitamos precisamente más de lo primero?

What the neural network “learns” is emergent rather than deduced. For example, it may notice a pattern that if it’s cloudy, then people are more likely to carry an umbrella. But it would not be able to explain that this is because cloudy implies rain and rain implies umbrella. Instead it effectively identifies a “rainy” vibe through correlations of... See more