Month: August 2017

Today’s Eponymy in August is a three-fer, as we will be talking about Holmström’s Theroem. Holmström’s Theorem states that it is impossible to have a system of economic incentives that satisfies all of the following three conditions: The latter two conditions are worth exploring on their own, given that they are also eponymous to their…

The Higgs Boson is also named for God, i.e. the “God particle,” as a compromise between Leon Lederman who called it “the goddamn particle” and his publisher for the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?. Higgs himself is not a fan of this formulation. The existence of…

Ezekiel Bulver is a figment of C.S. Lewis’s imagination, and though the famed author never did write the full biography of Bulver he intended, the backstory of the character was outlined in Lewis’s essay on the topic of Bulverism: “Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose…

Hyrum’s Law is a fairly new coinage. During an entertaining, Goofus & Gallant-themed 2015 talk at CppCon about writing good tests, Google engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright spent some time talking about writing tests that are resilient against changing the implementation, which is complicated because of a tendency of engineers everywhere (even at Google)…

There are untold ways of arguing in bad faith on the Internet, and this is one of them. The Gish Gallop is flooding an argument with weak evidence in such a large quantity that responding to it all is burdensome. There are a few different ways that this can manifest. In both spoken and written…

A boycott is a coordinated action against a business or other provider of goods and services, in which participants who would usually conduct business with the target refuse to do so; the term can be more widely applied to mean any coordinated refusal of cooperation or participation. Though boycotts go as far back as the…

Avogadro’s Number itself is roughly 6.022×10^23, and if you have this many of something, you have a “mole” of that thing. Why this matters, is that the mass of a mole of something, measured in grams, is the same as the mass of one of that thing, measured in atomic mass units (essentially the average…

Today’s Eponymy in August is Betteridge’s Law. It’s a useful rule of thumb for wading through news journalism that’s often sensationalized to grab your attention. Oftentimes you will see the headlines of news articles phrased as questions, e.g., “Is the Blockchain Economy Ushering in a New World Economic Order?” or “Did Science Finally Measure the…

Hello fans! It’s the first of August again, and that means another month full of things named for people! Welcome to the 2017 edition of Eponymy in August. This won’t be a daily posting project like last year, but I’ve assembled a new group of eponyms for putting up this month at a regular clip.…