2017 was a rough social year for me. I was having a hard time connecting with new people I met and making new friends. I attended a lot of social gatherings over the weekends with the mindset of talking and interacting with people in more fun and meaningful ways, but I always fell flat of what I set out to accomplish.

Social skills are hard to come by because if you’re bad at socializing, you’ll be conditioned to not like socializing. Not enjoying socializing in turn makes you worse at socializing, and you have a vicious cycle. I felt trapped in this vicious cycle since my self-conscious attitude towards my social skills would pop out in a middle of a conversation while I socially implode mid sentence. Read More

Words decay as soon as they are invented. That’s because words and language are a distributed protocol to tie semantics (meanings) to representation (words). With so many people trying to communicate with each other, the distribution of these protocol are subject to chinese whispers and decay. This essay traces how words might change for the worse.

Stage 1: Neologism

The birth of words begins when there is a semantic (meaning) without a representation (word), so people invent a new word to “point” at the semantics. “Google” was a favorite modern word officially added into the English dictionary in 2006. It was a new verb that was used to describe the searching of information on the internet because no previous word existed to describe what the word “google” described. Words are saved because no one ever has to say “Why don’t you search it on the internet?” ever again. We say “Why don’t you google it?”. All is good. Read More