Month: August 2016

Today is August 31st, and so this will be the final edition of Eponymy in August for the year. I hope to leave off with something inspiring, so today’s Eponymy in August is Plato’s Cave. Plato was an Athenian philosopher in the fourth century BCE, and a pivotal figure in the development of Western philosophy.…

Today’s Eponymy in August is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. You may also have heard this one attributed to Bertrand Russell, Charles Bukowski, or W.B. Yeats; all of these are correctly attributed. While Yeats was the first of the three to pen this principle (and was himself preceded by at very least Darwin and Confucius), Russell’s phrasing…

Today’s Eponymy in August is the Overton Window. Joseph P. Overton was the vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Michigan. In the 1990s he observed that, on the topic of school choice (still a contentious topic today!), one could order all of the possible policies by how…

Eponymy in August is winding down [ed note: for 2016], but I thought it would be fun to do another fun, food-related one. So let’s talk about the Luther Burger. The Luther Burger is a bacon cheeseburger served on a sliced and griddled Krispy Kreme doughnut. Unlike a normal hamburger bun, the doughnut bun is…

Concisely stated, Gresham’s Law claims “Bad money drives good money out of circulation.” In this scenario, “good” money means a form of currency whose base material is at least as valuable as the face value of the denomination, while “bad” money is an equivalent form of currency whose material value is significantly less than its…

Today’s Eponymy in August is Kepler’s Second Law of Planetary Motion.Johannes Kepler was an early 17th century astronomer, and the protege of Tycho Brahe. Kepler had published a defense of the Copernican (heliocentric) system of planets and stars in the late 16th century, and attempted to tie the Platonic solids to the orbits of the…

Melvin Conway is a computer scientist who made several early stage contributions to the field, including early specifications of coroutines and compiler compilers. His later work included development of the MUMPS medical programming environment. In 1967, Conway published an article in the magazine Datamation, titled “How Do Committees Invent?” In this article he detailed how…

Today’s edition of Eponymy in August is Brooks’ Law. In the eponymous’s original words, “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Fred Brooks called this statement an outrageous oversimplification in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. This book is sometimes called the bible of software engineering, because everybody quotes it, some people…

Thorstein Veblen was an American economist, who taught at Chicago, Stanford, and Missouri before accepting a position in Woodrow Wilson’s administration as part of a group aiming to peacefully resolve the First World War, and later helped to found The New School. Veblen is notable for being a non-Marxist anti-capitalist, who espoused the idea that…