Wet lab.
“Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes away.
Don’t do this: if you put your open hand into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you can hold it under the liquid at -196C/-320F because the boiling on the surface of your hand makes an insulating quilt. It’s a fun game. Closing your hand will create traps and you’ll get horrible burns.
Wet market.
The Wuhan wet markets entered the vernacular during Covid right? There are new things you need to refer to in a new context.
Wet-bulb temperature.
The lowest temperature that can be reached by the evaporation of water
(Wikipedia).
It’s a function of air temperature and humidity and humans can’t survive about a wet-bulb temperature of 35C, equivalent to 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. i.e. sweating is no longer effective so you heat up and your proteins denature.
I first encountered this term in The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson which traces the worsening climate crisis, and wow, there’s a new term for a new context that it feels like we will be seeing in the news more in the coming years.
Wet pub.
A pub that does not serve food.
Wet signature.
It’s like “landline:” we never needed a word for a phone that was tied to the wall before there were phones that weren’t tied to the wall.
We never needed a term to say that this signature was made by an actual present human before we had photocopies and then computers.
Although somehow a robotic, automated autopen is granted “wet signature” status?
Autopens as previously discussed, which also mentions Margaret Atwood’s Longpen which is not automated and requires her to be syncronously present – but perhaps a 1,000 miles away from where the signature happens.
Wet hire, wet lease.
Equipment hire that includes human operators is wet hire.
As an aircraft operator, leasing a plane that includes staff is a wet lease.
Wet implies humans in both cases.
Wetware.
Hardware, software, wetware.
Back in the 80s, wetware - used somewhat ironically - meant your brain: “thinking” is running a task on the 3lb of wet meat in your skull.
I get the feeling that wetware today means lab-grown neurons? Wetware computers that run on cerebral organoids.
We didn’t really have words that weren’t made by humans until recently. Except for divine words and random words, both exalted.
I suppose we had widely reproduced words, and we call that “copy.”
But from now on, I guess, most words will be words not by humans, and that’s the new default. So we’ll need a name to specifically mean human words.
Wet words?
These are wet words!
One day we’ll have cyborg sleeves that move our arms for us and we’ll need a word for our own movements, and brain-computer interfaces that inject ideas and unearth memories and do reasoning for us, and we’ll need to call out plain old human brain-work: look ma I thunk it all myself.
Wet thoughts.
Wet lab.
“Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes away.
Don’t do this: if you put your open hand into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you can hold it under the liquid at -196C/-320F because the boiling on the surface of your hand makes an insulating quilt. It’s a fun game. Closing your hand will create traps and you’ll get horrible burns.
Wet market.
The Wuhan wet markets entered the vernacular during Covid right? There are new things you need to refer to in a new context.
Wet-bulb temperature.
(Wikipedia).
It’s a function of air temperature and humidity and humans can’t survive about a wet-bulb temperature of 35C, equivalent to 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. i.e. sweating is no longer effective so you heat up and your proteins denature.
I first encountered this term in The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson which traces the worsening climate crisis, and wow, there’s a new term for a new context that it feels like we will be seeing in the news more in the coming years.
Wet pub.
A pub that does not serve food.
Wet signature.
It’s like “landline:” we never needed a word for a phone that was tied to the wall before there were phones that weren’t tied to the wall.
We never needed a term to say that this signature was made by an actual present human before we had photocopies and then computers.
Although somehow a robotic, automated autopen is granted “wet signature” status?
Autopens as previously discussed, which also mentions Margaret Atwood’s Longpen which is not automated and requires her to be syncronously present – but perhaps a 1,000 miles away from where the signature happens.
Wet hire, wet lease.
Equipment hire that includes human operators is wet hire.
As an aircraft operator, leasing a plane that includes staff is a wet lease.
Wet implies humans in both cases.
Wetware.
Hardware, software, wetware.
Back in the 80s, wetware - used somewhat ironically - meant your brain: “thinking” is running a task on the 3lb of wet meat in your skull.
I get the feeling that wetware today means lab-grown neurons? Wetware computers that run on cerebral organoids.
We didn’t really have words that weren’t made by humans until recently. Except for divine words and random words, both exalted.
I suppose we had widely reproduced words, and we call that “copy.”
But from now on, I guess, most words will be words not by humans, and that’s the new default. So we’ll need a name to specifically mean human words.
Wet words?
These are wet words!
One day we’ll have cyborg sleeves that move our arms for us and we’ll need a word for our own movements, and brain-computer interfaces that inject ideas and unearth memories and do reasoning for us, and we’ll need to call out plain old human brain-work: look ma I thunk it all myself.
Wet thoughts.