September 11 is the anniversary of the birth of Theodor Adorno, who was born in Frankfurt in 1903. As an example of how much the world has changed, just in the past century, Frankfurt was at the time part of Prussia and in the German Empire. Adorno was born Theodor Wiesengrund, and as a child… Continue reading

There are many ways to “be a writer.” If you recall last Thursday, our subject was A.K. Tolstoy, who’s remembered for writing historical dramas. His cousin, Leo Tolstoy (who was born September 9, 1828) is remembered for two novels considered among the best ever written, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Both Tolstoys wrote more,… Continue reading

Every once in a while you hear about somebody tagged as “the father of this” or “the mother of that.” But there’s a person you may not have heard of who’s credibly called the father of four entire fields: comparative religion, Indology (south Asian studies), anthropology, and geodesy (measurement and representation of Earth). I’m talking… Continue reading

In the mid-19th Century there was a social movement, mostly in the US, based on the idea that it was possible to create an ideal, perfect community. Quite a few such communities were founded and many continued for years. Their plan was to demonstrate that if a small community could thrive by following their ideas… Continue reading

We all learned, at least at a basic level, about atoms, radioactivity, atomic numbers of elements, and the like. For all of it we can thank Ernest Rutherford, who was born August 30, 1871 in New Zealand. At the time he was born, New Zealand was still a colony, not an independent country.  In 1887,… Continue reading

We often hear about the “big name” inventors who are credited with this or that major innovation, but not about the many others whose work refines “big ideas” into things that are actually usable. One of the people you may not have heard of is Charles Kettering, who was born August 29, 1876 in Ohio… Continue reading

If a boy enjoys insect collecting and wants to become an entomologist, but the town where he grew up gets engulfed by an expanding city, much of it is paved, and the habitats where he hunted bugs disappear, what can he do?  In the case of Satoshi Tajiri, who was born August 28, 1965 near… Continue reading

Do you enjoy road trips? Back in the days before GPS, in the US at least, one way to plot out a road trip was to use a “road atlas,” which contained maps of most of the roads across the country. The major thoroughfares were thick red lines, the multilane highways were orange, and the… Continue reading

Have you ever wondered how search engines work? Beyond just “make a list of all the words on all the websites,” I mean. The technical term for that “list of all the words on all the websites” is the “bag-of-words model.” No, really, that’s what it’s called. And the bag-of-words model doesn’t work very well… Continue reading

Do you remember the story, just a few years ago, about Anna Sorokin, who posed as a wealthy heiress in New York City and became close to any number of well-to-do New Yorkers, celebrities, and artists? Well she was probably not the last to try something like that, and it won’t surprise you to know… Continue reading