At the beginning of every summer in the US, college seniors compete for just a few prized positions: hotdoggers. A “hotdogger” is a promotional position with the Oscar Mayer company, which produces a popular brand of hot dogs, or weiners, and the most important part of the job is that the hotdoggers ride in and… Continue reading

Coffee drinkers worldwide today are toasting Angelo Moriondo, who was born June 6, 1851, and secured the productivity of the western world by inventing the espresso machine in 1884. Moriondo was born in Turin, Italy (although it wasn’t Italy in 1851) into a family of entrepreneurs. His grandfather founded a company that made liqueurs, his… Continue reading

We should definitely celebrate Whitfield Diffie’s 78th birthday today, seeing as he’s one of the people whose work makes many of the products we use possible. Diffie is a cryptographer who got interested in secret codes started when he was just ten years old. His father was a professor at City College in New York… Continue reading

We’re just starting Pride Month, so you’ll see plenty of rainbow flags — and as it happens, Gilbert Baker, who was born June 2, 1951, designed that flag. He was born in Kansas, and ended up in San Francisco when he was in the US Army — he was stationed there as a medic. After… Continue reading

Exactly 180 years ago today, Henry Faulds was born in North Ayrshire, Scotland. His family was not wealthy, so when he was just 13 he had to leave school and work as a clerk to help support them. But when he was 21 he went back to school, enrolling at Glasgow University to study math… Continue reading

One of Shakespeare’s famous passages is Hamlet’s concluding speech, which includes the phrase “aye, there’s the rub.” You can tell from the context that what Hamlet means by “the rub” is an obstacle or difficulty of some sort. But without the context — and in fact, without that particular famous passage — how would anybody… Continue reading