Month: August 2016

Today’s Eponymy in August continues Nerd Week with Zawinski’s Law.In the eponymous’s own words: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” This is a somewhat snarky (but rather accurate) understanding of the evolutionary process of applications. Applications which aren’t broken…

Paul Fitts was a psychology professor at Michigan and Ohio State, who had served in the Air Force and used an ergonomic model to improve safety in military aircraft. His most important contribution to human-computer interaction is the eponymous Fitts’ Law, which gives a mathematical basis for determining how easy or difficult it is to…

Today’s Eponymy in August continues Nerd Week with the RSA algorithm, named for its inventors Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. Rivest and Shamir were computer scientists at MIT who collaborated on trying to find an effective implementation of the public key encryption system proposed by Diffie and Hellman in 1976. Adleman was a…

Alan Turing was the father of computability. Working with Alonzo Church, Turing showed how different ways of approaching mechanical computing (his own Turing machine and Church’s lambda calculus) were equivalent to each other, and delineated the space of things that could be computed using such methods given nearly infinite time and resources. To this day,…

Today’s Eponymy in August is the Ben Franklin effect. In the eponymous’s own words, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”In a more modern language and analysis, there isn’t a causative effect from a person liking you to a…

Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) was a prolific science fiction writer, at one time the most anthologized writer in the genre. In addition to shorts and novels, Sturgeon wrote the screenplays for the Original Series Star Trek episodes “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time,” the latter of which introduced the concepts of pon farr and “Live Long and…

The Mandelbrot set is hard to explain mathematically without a bunch of jargon, but as simply as I can say it: At a low level of detail, it looks like this: Benoit Mandelbrot was a Polish born mathematictian, who moved to France as a child in the lead up to WWII and moved to America…

Today’s Eponymy in August is food themed. It’s also New Jersey themed since I’m currently in New Jersey. The Fat Darrell is a legend of the Grease Trucks that serve food around Rutgers University. As the story goes, and this story seems to be backed up, in 1997 Darrell Butler showed up at the RU…

There are two ways of stating Poe’s Law, the weaker one being: “There always exists a person who will mistake a parody of extremism for true extremism.” To state the converse, that someone will mistake true extremism for a parody of itself, is Poe’s Corollary. The stronger form of the Law is: “It is impossible…

Today’s Eponymy in August is, self-referentially, Stigler’s Law of Eponymy. Concisely stated, “No scientific discovery is named for its discoverer.” Stephen Stigler is a statistics professor at the University of Chicago and first published the law in 1980. He credits the late sociologist Robert K. Merton as having first discovered it, making the law self-describing…