Author: Bradley Momberger

Postel’s Law is not a normal “law” in that it’s not an observation of behavior nor an inevitability of systems. Rather, Postel’s Law is an eponymous renaming of the Robustness Principle, a prescription for how to design software to follow a standard when it has to communicate with other software following the same standard: “Be…

A little late for the start of August for work reasons, but here’s the first Eponymy in August for 2019. Today’s Eponymy is the guillotine. The guillotine is a device for cleanly and reliably committing executions by beheading. A large, slightly angled blade on a frame of vertical rails is hoisted via a rope, the…

Well it’s once again the end of August, with just enough time for one last Eponymy in August post for 2018. I’ve been saving this punchy one: today’s Eponymy is Cunningham’s Law. This is another Internet-native law, and it states, “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask…

When observed in space, subatomic particles move in irregular, unpredictable ways. For example, the 53pm distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its lone orbiting electron is a calculated average of where an electron will show up in the electron cloud during any observation. In the Copenhagen interpretation (a consensus of physicists in the 1920s about…

As a motivating example of Simpson’s Paradox, Ken Ross in his 2004 book A Mathematician at the Ballpark presents the interesting case of the batting averages of David Justice and Derek Jeter in the mid ’90s. In each year examined, Justice had the better batting average: 1995 .253 to .250 1996 .321 to .314 1997…

Kinnearing is taking (or attempting to take) a picture of someone on the sly, usually without looking at a viewfinder or projection of the camera viewport. The results rarely capture the subject well, if they capture the subject at all. The term was coined by Stephanie Pearl McPhee, a/k/a the Yarn Harlot, who saw Greg…

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and the founder of the Wordnik online dictionary. She received her AB/AM in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1993 and has been both the Editor-in-Chief and the Chief Consulting Editor of American dictionaries for the Oxford University press. McKean and a small team founded Wordnik in 2008 as…

Richard William “Wil” Wheaton is the wunderkind of a particular branch of sci-fi and nerd culture. Though his first major acting role of note was Gordie in the movie Stand By Me, Wheaton remains best known for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: the Next Generation. Wheaton left the cast as a regular in 1990…

Today’s edition of Eponymy in August is contextually relevant, as a few days ago I was commiserating with some family members over having had dentists and other medical practitioners who try to upsell services. It might not be expected that physicians and medical professionals in small private practices would need to upsell patients, but it’s…

Today’s edition of Eponymy in August is hopefully a quick one, because I have to get to bed soon and prep for a long drive in the morning. But there are many things to do between now and when I depart. So let’s talk about the Zeigarnik Effect. Bluma Zeigarnik, née Gerstein, was a 20th…