1. The Pareto principle

    The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

    1. ​80/20 is the new Half-Ass​
  2. Pinkas Synagogue

    Pinkas Synagogue (my own photo)

    Names of the Holocaust victims from Czech lands on the synagogue's inner wall.

    During reconstruction in 1950–1954, the original floor-level as well as the appearance of the synagogue were restored. In following five years, the walls of the synagogue were covered with names of about 78,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of Shoah. The names are arranged by communities where the victims came from and complemented with their birth and death date.

  3. Saudade

    Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again.

    For a long time I've considered the word melancholy to have a kind of nostalgic association, though I've also known for a while that's not accurate. Saudade captures the feeling which I always thought melancholy meant.

  4. Transclusion

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    In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by hypertext reference. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places.

    Transclusion facilitates modular design: a resource is stored once and distributed for reuse in multiple documents. Updates or corrections to a resource are then reflected in any referencing documents. Ted Nelson coined the term for his 1980 nonlinear book Literary Machines, but the idea of master copy and occurrences was applied 17 years before, in Sketchpad.

    1. ​Designing Synced Blocks​
  5. Phonaesthetics

    Phonaesthetics is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien, during the mid-twentieth century and derives from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē, "voice-sound") plus the Greek: αἰσθητική (aisthētikē, "aesthetic").

    1. ​Sonorisms I​
    2. ​Gods of the Word​
  6. Wang tiles

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    Wang tiles (Hao Wang, 1961) are a class of formal systems. They are modelled visually by square tiles with a color on each side. A set of such tiles is selected, and copies of the tiles are arranged side by side with matching colors, without rotating or reflecting them.

    The basic question about a set of Wang tiles is whether it can tile the plane or not, i.e., whether an entire infinite plane can be filled this way. The next question is whether this can be done in a periodic pattern.

    In 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the problem in the negative. He proved that no algorithm for the problem can exist, by showing how to translate any Turing machine into a set of Wang tiles that tiles the plane if and only if the Turing machine does not halt. The undecidability of the halting problem then implies the undecidability of Wang's tiling problem.

    1. ​Truchet Tiles​
    2. ​The Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet and the Topology of Structural Hierarchy​
  7. Tactical urbanism

    Tactical urbanism includes low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighborhoods and city gathering places. Tactical urbanism is also commonly referred to as guerrilla urbanism, pop-up urbanism, city repair, or D.I.Y. urbanism.

    The Street Plans Collaborative defines "tactical urbanism" as an approach to urban change that features the following five characteristics:

    1. A deliberate, phased approach to instigating change;
    2. The offering of local solutions for local planning challenges;
    3. Short-term commitment and realistic expectations;
    4. Low-risks, with a possibly high reward; and
    5. The development of social capital between citizens and the building of organizational capacity between public-private institutions, non-profits, and their constituents.
    1. ​The Help-Yourself City​
  8. Inglenook

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    An inglenook, or chimney corner, is a recess that adjoins a fireplace. The inglenook originated as a partially enclosed hearth area, appended to a larger room. The hearth was used for cooking, and its enclosing alcove became a natural place for people seeking warmth to gather. With changes in building design, kitchens became separate rooms, while inglenooks were retained in the living space as intimate warming places, subsidiary spaces within larger rooms.

    1. ​Thermal Delight in Architecture​
    2. ​Thermal aediculae​

    Like the four-poster bed, an inglenook creates the image of a special warm enclave, for its function is intuitively clear: with seats built in along the walls, it is just large enough for a few people to gather close to the fire's radiant warmth and be shielded from drafts.

    — Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture

  9. Aedicula

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    Front of the Library of Celsus with aediculae in Ephesus.

    In ancient Roman religion, an aedicula (plural aediculae) is a small shrine.

    Many aediculae were household shrines that held small altars or statues of the Lares and Penates, household gods guarding the entire house.

    Other aediculae were small shrines within larger temples, usually set on a base, surmounted by a pediment and surrounded by columns. In ancient Roman architecture the aedicula has this representative function in the society. They are installed in public buildings like the triumphal arch, city gate, and thermae.

    From the 4th century Christianization of the Roman Empire onwards such shrines, or the framework enclosing them, are often called by the Biblical term tabernacle, which becomes extended to any elaborated framework for a niche, window or picture.

    1. ​Thermal aediculae​
  10. Caustic (optics)

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    Caustics made by the surface of water.

    In optics, a caustic is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. The caustic is a curve or surface to which each of the light rays is tangent, defining a boundary of an envelope of rays as a curve of concentrated light.

    1. ​Architectural Caustics​
    2. ​Caustic Engineering​
  11. Terroir

    Terroir is a French term used to describe the environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop's specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.

    1. ​The material finds the right object​
  12. Mondegreen

    A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.

    American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".

    1. ​Misinterpretation as inspiration​
  13. Eating your own dog food

    Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers confidence in their own products.

    1. ​Designer, implementor, user, writer​
    2. ​The reflective craftsman​
  14. Illa de la Discòrdia

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    A city block on Passeig de Gràcia in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The block is noted for having buildings by four of Barcelona's most important Modernista architects, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Enric Sagnier, in close proximity. As the four architects' styles were very different, the buildings clash with each other and the neighboring buildings.

  15. Baumol’s cost disease

    Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth.

    The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.

  16. ƒ/8 and be there

    "f/8 and be there" is an expression popularly used by photographers to indicate the importance of taking the opportunity for a picture rather than being too concerned about using the best technique. Often attributed to the noir-style New York City photographer Weegee, it has come to represent a philosophy in which, on occasion, action is more important than reflection.

  17. Betteridge's law of headlines

    Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

    It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.