Author: Bradley Momberger

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.…

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…