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August 20
You’ve probably heard the term “going postal.” When it’s used as dark humor, it means being driven nuts by events and people around you. When it’s used seriously, it means shooting your coworkers. “Going postal” comes from this very day in 1986. Patrick Sherrill, a “relief carrier” in the Edmond, Oklahoma post office, brought a… Continue reading
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Born Today: Philo Farnsworth
If you’ve ever watched television — and it would be a rare individual nowadays who hasn’t — make a note that today, August 19, is the birthday of Philo Farnsworth, who invented the first all-electronic television system (including a camera) in the 1930s. Farnsworth was born in 1906 in Utah, in the US. When he… Continue reading
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Dashboard
There’s a lot of talk about “dashboards” in the business world today. Everybody wants a “dashboard” presenting a summary of relevant information. Some software products are, to users, dashboards. The ready analogy, of course, is to the dashboard in an automobile, although it should also be noted that as manufacturers switched from analog gauges to… Continue reading
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August 19
Carl Fisher was born in Indianapolis in 1874. Not today; his birthday was in January. He joined in the bicycle craze of the late 1800s and opened a bike shop. By the early 20th century the shop was doing pretty well, and Fisher’s new enthusiasm was for those new horseless carriages. He saw a big… Continue reading
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Beyond the Pale Picket Fence
“Pale” isn’t an exact synonym for “white”, as in “white picket fence”, but it’s pretty close. And as everybody who’s grown up in or even visited suburban areas in the US, a “picket fence” is a pretty standard thing to have around the front yards there, and nearly all of them are painted white. But… Continue reading
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Tautochrone
Imagine you want to build a clock, but annoyingly enough, you find yourself stuck several centuries in the past, and you don’t really know how to start. The first thing you need is something that “ticks” in a reliably steady cadence. Enter the pendulum. Pendulums swing back and forth pretty steadily. Pendulums started being used… Continue reading
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Born Today: Agneta Horn
A professional historian has said “we know less than 1% of what really happened five hundred years ago, and two thirds of that is wrong.” So how do we know anything at all about the past? One source, at least in the European tradition, is writers who recorded events in their lives and their impressions… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com