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Gene Amdahl was a computer engineer in the purest sense of the word, having architected the legendary System/360 at IBM and pioneered other mainframe technologies at a series of his own enterprises. Amdahl was in the graduate physics program at the University of Wisconsin in 1950, and along with fellow graduate student Charlie Davidson proposed…

Last night I was on my laptop (a MacBook Pro M1 from 2022) and I noticed that it was running extremely hot. It was a combination of a Twitch stream in the background and a few shopping sites in browser tabs playing media that combined to create a bunch of CPU cycles going to waste…

Thomas Schelling was an American political economist, who received his doctorate from Harvard in 1951 after writing his dissertation mostly at night while helping to implement the Marshall Plan in Europe. He went on to a career in the faculties of Yale, Harvard, and the University of Maryland, College Park, while also working with the…

The Lindy Effect is a good place to restart Eponymy in August. This project originally began in August of 2016 and ran for four straight Augusts until I ran out of steam, got crushed by 2020, and got further crushed in 2021. I had thought about migrating it from Facebook posts to a proper blog…

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…