It takes a long time between inception and application. What I mean is that a process or machine that becomes ubiquitous and influential in one era often turns out to have been invented years or decades earlier — often so long back that the original inventor is relatively forgotten in favor of the popularizer of… Continue reading

Joshua Slocum was born February 20, 1844 in Nova Scotia, Canada. As far as anybody knows, he was the first person to sail around the world alone. A lot of people do know about Slocum, though, because after he got back in 1900 he wrote a best-selling book, Sailing Alone Around the World. The Slocum… Continue reading

No matter how you communicate over the Internet, what you send can often be intercepted, spied on, used against you, or censored by any number of governmental and non-governmental entities. One alternative is Hyphanet, which until last year had been called Freenet since its inception in 2000. It was originally conceived by Ian Clarke, who… Continue reading

Good morning! Today the world’s only self-declared pilingual person turns 78. A (or the) pilingual person has concluded that their degree of mastery of languages comes to 3.14159… And their name is Douglas R. Hoftstadter.  Hofstadter was born in New York City, and grew up in California when his family moved because his father, physicist… Continue reading

On the off chance that you ever use a computer keyboard, you may be either glad or annoyed that today is the birthday of Christopher Latham Sholes, who invented the QWERTY keyboard. Sholes invented the keyboard as part of the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, which he invented, along with Carlos Glidden, in the late 1860s. … Continue reading

You’ve heard of the great Russian writers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pushkin, but another one you may not know about was born February 13, 1769 in Moscow. Ivan Andreyevich Krylov was the son of a military officer, but his father died when Krylov was 10. Krylov and his mother were left in poverty, and moved… Continue reading

Here’s a coincidence I didn’t know about until today: the scientist Charles Darwin and the US President Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, February 12, 1809.  Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, and introduced the theory of natural selection. he initially studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, but switched to natural science… Continue reading

If you think items you read like AI-this or AI-that, or cyborg robots, or even Elon Musk’s plan to implant computer chips in people are actually news, let me introduce Kevin Warwick, whose 70th birthday is today.  Warwick was born in Coventry, England, and earned a PhD at Imperial College, where he stayed on as… Continue reading

About five or six centuries ago in central Europe, they just did things differently. At least they did with regard to the nobility. Nobody ever wrote down anything about the common people, so we have no idea.  A case in point is Ulrich, the Duke of Würtemberg. He was born February 8 in 1487, and… Continue reading