Author: Bradley Momberger

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…

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pareto has several contributions to the field of microeconomics, but his most famous one was based on an observation of wealth distribution in 1890s Italy. Specifically, the distribution of wealth followed a power law, where the output of a function follows a trend…

Barbra Streisand is an actress, entertainer, and the best selling female recording artist in history, having 33 albums make the Billboard top 10 and selling close to 150 million records worldwide. She is a multiple time Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Golden Globe recipient. In 2003 Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman to remove a picture of…

John Morton was the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England at the end of the fifteenth century. Part of his role at such a high level was setting tax policy for the kingdom, with the goal of restoring the assets of Henry VII’s royal house after the war-heavy reigns of Edward IV and…

There’s [ed note: up until it closed in 2024] a lovely rum & punch bar in Haight-Ashbury with the name Hobson’s Choice, but the slogan on their sign (“Order what you like, as long as it’s what I offer”) doesn’t quite go far enough. Hobson’s Choice is, “Take it or leave it.” Specifically, it is…