Words and links

Hullo!

This letter’s late hour is thanks to my being on vacation—what feels like the first in a long while, too long. My vacation is about what you’d expect: coffee and games with friends, vinyl played almost too loud, long country drives, reading, and a constant sense that I’m not vacation-ing “right”.

I could dive into this latter item, my tendency to over-optimize, but I won’t.

Instead, I’ll share with you one of my favourite words:

vulgariser (French): to make comprehensible, e.g., by removing jargon.

Isn’t it great!? In English, “vulgar” has such a different sense—as if you’d gone too far in vulgarizing something, and resorted to baser language. (“Vulgarize” is also an English word; both come from Latin, but I’ve only ever encountered it in French. I like the French one better.)

And, well, some random links!

• A great resource explaining basic descriptive statistics (from the mean to z-scores). (“From a to z-sco—”, ahaha, I’ll show myself out.)
• Pavarotti on the high Cs.
• A very scary (and, to bring this all back to where we started, very optimized) SimCity save.

Okay that’s all from me! Good times, everyone!! 🕺

Lucas