Castor oil is a vegetable oil derived from the castor bean seed in its purest form. It is colorless, odorless and tasteless.
Encoding globally available pointers helps protect them from being exploited. The EncodePointer function obfuscates the pointer value with a secret so that it cannot be predicted by an external agent. The secret used by EncodePointer is different for each process. A pointer must be decoded before it can be used.
A pointer is a computer science term for a variable that, instead of holding a bit of information, holds an address to where that information can be found in a computer's memory. You can imagine the variable as a signpost that \points\ to where the information can be found.