Five Word Jargon
Five Word Jargon
[White Hat, holding his palm up, is speaking to Cueball, who is typing with both hands on his smartphone. What he types is indicated with a jagged line going up from his phone.] White Hat: Yeah, I learned about it when I was researching anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis. Cueball: Cooool. Text on phone: A-n-o-m-
[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Collecting really satisfying-sounding five-word technical phrases.
Current favorites Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt placement Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model Unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacteria group A Anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis

This is another comic in Randall 's My Hobby series , the first of two hobby comics released in the same week, the second being 2328: Space Basketball .
This hobby involves "collecting" and presumably using five-words-long technical jargon. In the comic, White Hat uses a phrases with five such words while talking to Randall (as Cueball ), causing Randall to exclaim "cool" (as in what a cool sentence), and then proceed to type the phrase into his phone to add to his list of favorite Five Word Jargon.
Randall then proceeds to list his current favorites among really satisfying five word technical phrases (or jargon) as a caption below the panel, with White Hat's phrase as the last, possibly the newest. Maybe it was the one that caused Randall to consider other phrases and make this comic.
In the title text, Randall says that he has another much harder hobby, which is to engineer situations where he can use more than one of his favorite phrases. It would seem difficult to combine any of the four listed phrases in a given conversation, as they are from four separate fields (medicine, economics/statistics, biology, and physics/cosmology). However, he said "situations", which is broader term than "conversations".  For example, someone could arrange for experts on these fields to deliver TED talks on these topics, so that he could introduce them by saying "today, we will learn about..." and list the phrases, but Randall cannot, because he has been banned from TED .  At least he has succeeded in using them together in this comic.
This technique has also been used by the [ [1] ], who uses three-word phrases to create excuses for why he won't fix someone's computer when they ask.
A transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) is "an artificial channel within the liver that connects the inflow portal vein and the outflow hepatic vein".  It is used to treat various intestinal bleeding. This term can be found in this publication: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16850140/ transjugular the shunt is inserted via the jugular vein intrahepatic within the liver portosystemic blood is shunted from the portal vein (draining blood from the intestines to the liver) to the systemic circulation (returning blood from the liver to the heart) shunt a tube within the body that bypasses the normal flow of something (whether a natural defect, or an artificial device) placement the operation to insert it
A generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model is a statistical model for economic research. An autoregressive model of a time series is one that uses previous values of the time series to predict the next value. A conditional probability model is one that divides data into inputs and outputs and models the relation between them using a conditional probability distribution of the outputs given the inputs. A heteroskedastic distribution is one in which the variance (or standard deviation) of a random variable is not the same across all values of the variable. This phrase can be found in this publication: https://www.scirp.org/html/11-1241334_99870.htm
Generalized making more general, as opposed to a specific model autoregressive using previous values to predict future values. conditional outputs depending on specific inputs (in the sense of, "funding is conditional on meeting targets") heteroskedasticity the property where the variance (that is, the random difference between an expected value and its observed value) itself varies in response to some variable. From Greek, meaning "different dispersion". For example, a graph of expenditure on food against income shows higher randomness at higher income levels, because poor people always eat cheaply, while rich people sometimes do and sometimes don't. model a set of equations that attempt to describe some property of the world for the purpose of analysis
A unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacterium is a single-celled type of bacteria that is able to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a more usable form, and also generates oxygen through photosynthesis. The term can also be found in this publication: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4303622/ unicellular Consisting of only one cell ( Unicellular organism ), such as all bacteria. The opposite is multicellular , which includes almost all other lifeforms like animals, plants, algae, etc. diazatrophic Having the property of fixing nitrogen from the air into other chemicals. cyanobacterium A fairly broad category of bacteria which often play an important role in various habitats, using photosynthesis to convert light energy to oxygen. "Cyano" refers to their general blue colour, not cyanide. group A the "first" group of several groups in a controlled experiment, or a scientific study; in this case, it is the first of several (B, C) groups of phylogenetically-related organisms, for which there is as yet no published scientific name, see here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308030272_The_small_unicellular_diazotrophic_symbiont_UCYN-A_is_a_key_player_in_the_marine_nitrogen_cycle .
This is a term from Particle physics / cosmology . Baryons are subatomic particles containing an odd number of quarks; protons and neutrons are the most familiar examples. Baryogenesis is the hypothetical physical process that took place during the early universe that produced more matter than antimatter in the observable universe (or it could be any process that produces baryons). Sphaleron is a static (time-independent) solution to the electroweak field equations of the Standard Model of particle physics, and is involved in certain hypothetical processes that change the number of baryons or leptons (e.g. forming baryons and removing leptons).  It is believed that the electroweak interaction is responsible for baryogenesis, but that at the temperatures involved (~10 15 K), sphaleron interactions would wipe out any excess of baryons; therefore, for baryogenesis to "stick", it must have occurred at the transition out of the electroweak era...unless there were some kind of anomaly in the formation or interaction of sphalerons. Google reports no matches (other than this page) for the entire phrase in quotes, but shows about 70 results unquoted, indicating it finds only partial matches.
Anomalous Deviating from normal or expected electroweak A theory combining electromagnetism and the weak interaction , two of the four fundamental forces (alongside the strong interaction and gravity) in the Standard Model of particle physics. sphaleron a single, time-independent, solution to electroweak field equations, represented as a saddle point between two different low energy equilibria transition change baryogenesis creating baryons, which are a category subatomic particles containing an odd number of quarks, including protons and neutrons. (-genesis is a general suffix for a process which creates something; eg carcinogenesis means, creating cancer)
[White Hat, holding his palm up, is speaking to Cueball, who is typing with both hands on his smartphone. What he types is indicated with a jagged line going up from his phone.] White Hat: Yeah, I learned about it when I was researching anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis. Cueball: Cooool. Text on phone: A-n-o-m-
[Caption below the panel:] My Hobby: Collecting really satisfying-sounding five-word technical phrases.
Current favorites Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt placement Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model Unicellular diazotrophic cyanobacteria group A Anomalous electroweak sphaleron transition baryogenesis
