A tragedy of the English language
I think it’s a tragedy of the English language that the words “million”, “billion”, and “trillion” sound so similar. The actual difference between each number is hard for people to imagine, even programmers who are used to dealing with large quantities and orders of magnitude. My current favorite illustrative example is:
Let’s say you have an operation that takes 0.5 ms to complete and you need to run it on a large data set. Running it on a million things might take ten minutes, a nice coffee break. Running it on a billion things might take six days, a background process you really don’t want to interrupt or run twice. Running it on a trillion things might take 16 years. Don’t do that.
Write more like you talk
Most people’s writing would improve if they wrote more like they talked. You probably learned how to write in an academic setting and do most of your writing in a similarly formal setting. While you’ve probably had plenty of casual conversations in text, people often don’t consider that “real writing” and try not to let it affect their writing style. But you’ve got so much experience breaking things down and clearly conveying them in casual conversation that could benefit your writing with a small change of mindset.
Flip a coin if it doesn't matter
If you’re trying to decide between two things that sound equally good, like which place to have lunch, flip a coin. When the coin picks one for you, sometimes you’ll immediately feel happy or sad about what it picked. If you notice that happening, do the thing that makes you happy instead of the thing the coin picked. (If you don’t notice that, just do what the coin picks, since either outcome is probably fine, and you won’t have to think about the decision any more.)
burrito
The wrap burrito is first found in print in English in Erna Fergusson’s Mexican Cookbook, published in 1934 in New Mexico. However, the burrito described in this cookbook is more like what we’d call a tostada today.
In Mexico, the term seems to have arrived at its modern meaning in the late 1800s; an 1895 dictionary lists the modern usage as one of its meanings, with the other being a regional slang term for “taco”. In Mexican Spanish, burrito originates from a diminutive of burro (donkey). The food is probably so named because it resembles a rolled-up pack often found on the back of a donkey.
The Spanish word burro descends directly from the Latin burricus, meaning small horse, which itself is named after the color burrus, meaning reddish-brown. Latin burrus is a borrowing from Greek πυρρός (purros), meaning flame-colored, yellowish-red, or tawny. The Greek color is clearly named after its root πῦρ (pur), meaning fire, like we see in the borrowed English prefix pyro-.
Knowing a concept's name is really useful
We live in an age of wonders where learning an entity’s truename allows anyone to pull up a practically limitless pool of information on it. I feel like I appreciate this much more, having growing up in a world where it was not true. This is relevant because many educational resources continue to assume the world is like the way it was in 1994 and overstuff you with information about a concept, because where else would you find more information about the concept?
In 2024, I think it’s much more effective to pique someone’s curiosity by giving a single, punchy example to illustrate the concept and providing its truename. Then they will know whether they want to learn more, and do that on their own if so. For example, Benford’s Law is the observation that in many real-world data sets, like a list of the altitude of every US city in feet, the number 1 occurs significantly more than 10% of the time, the number 2 the is second-most frequent, and so on. You are now free to do with that information what you will.