1. Of sound sampled out of its original context.

Jesse Thorn: Now, what kind of music when you were in school were you composing? What were your goals in your composition?

Dan Deacon: I just wanted to try as much stuff that appealed to me as possible. I didn't really focus on anything; maybe I should've. In the beginning it was just sort of a mish-mash of everything, very Fluxus influenced compositions, or like, just weird text-based scores for non-musicians, just to make sounds at various intervals of time, or like very in-depth, very complex traditional notational scores for string ensemble or brass ensemble; pieces for small orchestra.

And then weird electronic sort of pop songs, at the same time, and then trying to mesh those two worlds together. I was really influenced by Negativland, and this female composer, Vicki Bennett, who goes by People Like Us, and started doing more plunderphonic compositions where it was focused exclusively on using samples and sample manipulation and just trying to mesh all those worlds together. —Dan Deacon, The Sound of Young America

1. To simulate civic or social action in a mock context.

1. The private legacy software written in Perl with which Perl 5 must remain backwards compatible.

Compare the mountains of corporate Visual Basic apps with which Windows must maintain compatibility, at high cost.

Not that it shouldn't be done, we need not burden ourselves with bad practices forever, but deprecation cycles and dealing with dormant CPAN modules and code in the DarkPAN means it will take time. —David Landgren, "This Week on perl5-porters - 6-12 January 2008"

1. One who is interested in personal dramas, especially in media.

You remember how the X-Files fans, they were divided into the shippers and the non-shippers? ... There were the people who were into the relationship between Scully and Mulder.... I feel like I am squarely a shipper. In any story, I'm a shipper. —Ira Glass, "Ira Glass of This American Life," The Sound of Young America

1. The quality of having been proximate to a historically significant event or person.

All these artifacts share the quality that Philip K. Dick, in his 1962 novel "The Man in the High Castle," calls historicity, which is "when a thing has history in it." In the book, a dealer in antiquities holds up two identical Zippo lighters, one of which supposedly belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and says: "One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object has ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? ... You can't. You can't tell which is which. There's no 'mystical plasmic presence,' no 'aura' around it."

Back in the real world, in 1996, Sotheby's sold a humidor that had belonged to John F. Kennedy for $574,500. It had historicity. —James Gleick, "Keeping It Real," New York Times Magazine

1. Human-friendly behavior on the part of a government or corporation.

44. Compliance [コンプライアンス]: “Compliance” used to simply mean compliance with the law, but it has recently come to mean compliance with ethical standards and rules that industry groups and companies impose on themselves. The word has grown in popularity as companies feel ever-increasing pressure to maintain a clean image. —"Top 60 Japanese buzzwords of 2007," Pink Tentacle

Of people, a better word might be unmutual, as used in an episode of The Prisoner.

1. An inexpensively produced entertainment product that claims deep meaning directly relevant to the deficiencies in consumers' lives.

You can usually spot a FEBL film from the outset because they often use cheap graphic effects with bad rendering and metaphors. In Zeitgeist we have the earth surrounded by a pixelated metal cage. —David Galbraith, "Zeitgeist - the greatest lie ever told"

1. The flash mob of knee-jerk idiocy directed around the web by link-centric communities.

Anyone who blogs regularly knows its generally a relatively peaceful, often times fun experience. You sort of get to know your “regulars” that visit and comment. It becomes a loose little clique. Then you get Dugg.... —Richard Ziade, comment on "Fanboys Are Stupid, But You Are Not"

1. To make a normal action in a noticeable way, as a carrier of intent or a "call for feedback."

To be honest, I can't remember what the documentary said was the cause of stimming, but I have come to think of stimming as a way of making and keeping boundaries.

For those guys on the train, snapping might be a way of marking "this page done." ... It's even possible that by snapping the pages of the magazine seem to be asking us to observe how expeditiously the dispatch the task of... turning a page. These guys are judged by results. And the issue of performance may be so pressing that they feel obliged to show with what skill and speed they assimilated the contents of the magazine. —Grant McCracken, "Account planners and fearless noticing"

1. The event after which all Internet traffic exclusively comprises spam, lolcats, and links to YouTube videos.

Future historians will have decided total lol was inevitable once the US Congress mandated IPv6 on the behalf of News Corporation's newly merged Dow Jones/IANA division, and every electronic device was given not only its own IP address but its own Myspace.

1. A manned spacecraft.

The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a μ-commerce bus that scattered half a million pico-probes throughout the Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans (one from Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if colonization is about to explode, except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove's mass. —Charles Stross, Accelerando

1. Someone who gets things done; a task list ninja.

At the point when I spend all my time talking about programming, and very little of my time programming, my worst fear has been realized: I've become a pundit. The last thing the world needs is more pundits. ... They don't materially participate in the construction of any lasting artifacts; instead, they passively observe other people's work and offer a neverending babbling brook of opinions, criticism, and witty turns of phrase. —Jeff Atwood, "Yes, But What Have You Done?"

1. A photograph or video in which a point light source is moved during a long exposure to leave a drawing in the frame.

Pikapika is a photographic technique of making a long-exposure still photograph in a dark space. A person with a small flashlight uses the exposure time to draw a picture in the air. Do this a number of times with animation in mind, and you get a short video of a neon-like cartoon floating in air. The apt subtitle of the pikapika site is "lightning doodle project". —Ned Batchelder, "Pikapika"

Pika may be most familiar to English speakers in another context, chu being the sound mice make.

1. A measure of data approximately equivalent to 10,224 bytes; that is, the data content of 72-column 0.007-inch thick punch cards that fit in a one-inch wide container.

How will we measure data in yards, you ask? Simple - we will return to the ancient days of computing and revive the first portable standard for data transport - the punch card! —Andrew Ducker, "A modest technological proposal in praise of imperialism"

1. To download data you are not authorized to copy to a USB thumb drive.

Bidding the caller adieu, Spence ran into an old security pal on his way to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino's blackjack tables. The duo headed to the bar to toss back some Jack Daniel's and chat. The pal said he heard the buzzword "thumbsucking" used recently to describe the unauthorized downloading of a company's data via a portable USB storage device. The phrase was apparently coined by Senforce Technologies. "Thumbsucking, Podslurping, Bluesnarfing or Sneakernetting--all the terms for small-device data theft sound like Dr. Seuss created them," mused the Mouser. —Spencer F. Katt, "Talk Rages in Lost Wages," eWeek