Pylimitics

To be successful, any product not only has to be invented and manufactured, but also sold. Alexander Winton, who was born 163 years ago today, didn’t invent the automobile (although he was involved very early) but when he sold a car he had made in 1898 for $1000 (a pretty high price back then), it… Continue reading

I think most people have heard of the idea of the “invisible hand” of markets. It’s an idea that came from Adam Smith, an odd and somewhat mysterious person whose birthdate is unknown, but he was baptized on June 16, 1723. He was born in Scotland and raised by a single mother; his father had… Continue reading

Half a millennium ago, European scholars were under some flawed impressions, including that the earth was the center of the universe (or at least the solar system, which I guess they would have called the “earth system” or something). But if you look a bit further than our typical eurocentric history tends to, you’ll find… Continue reading

On June 13, 1928, John Nash was born in West Virginia. If life was a zero-sum game, that would have meant that somebody else would have died at the same moment, but luckily for everybody, life is more like an n-player non-zero-sum non-cooperative game that instead has a Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies. Yeah, that’s… Continue reading

“Street photography” doesn’t really have much to do with streets; it’s candid, in-the-moment photography that usually has to do with people and usually happens in an urban environment (since that’s where most of the people are). It’s like photojournalism, but without any notion that the images are “news” in any way. It’s just recording ordinary… Continue reading

Everybody, I assume, is aware of “educational toys.” They’re things that are not just supposed to entertain children, but cost more than regular toys. No, wait, I mean they’re supposed to help children learn — by which we mean “learn the things we want them to learn” rather than everything else they’re learning anyway. But… Continue reading

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