Statistician Stephen Stigler wrote in 1980, “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” He identified this as a basic law of eponymy, admitted he was an “outsider to the sociology of science” acting in “flagrant violation of the institutional norms of humility,” and named the law after himself.
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The Umayyad poet Dhu al-Rumma, of the Bedouin tradition, was known to ask his listeners to transcribe his poems as he was reciting them, declaring that a book “does not forget or alter words or phrases which have taken the poet a long time to compose.”
A special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives asked Lewis W. Leeds, a ventilation engineer and prominent critic of the popular belief that night air is inherently harmful to humans, to assess air quality inside the Capitol in 1868. The resulting report concluded that the House Chamber “is really the foulest place in the whole building,” with vents “so choked up with tobacco spittal and sweepings of the floor as to render the air rising from them very disagreeable.”
“Not one cent for scenery,” Republican House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon said in opposition to President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation agenda. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson, at the signing of a conservation bill, said, “Today we are repealing Cannon’s law.”
“Today is my eighteenth birthday!” Alexandrina Victoria wrote in her journal on May 24, 1837. Less than a month later, she was awoken at six o’clock and informed she was queen of the United Kingdom. “I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things, inexperienced,” she noted that day, “but I am sure that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.” Her reign, at 63 years and 216 days, is the second longest of the British monarchy.
A radio broadcast based on The War of the Worlds brought pandemonium to Quito, Ecuador, in 1949, as thousands of people attempted to escape impending Martian gas raids. A mob set fire to the radio station’s building, killing fifteen inside. Authorities were slow to respond; most police and soldiers had been sent to the countryside to fend off the aliens.
In a letter from Deir el-Medina, an Egyptian village of artisans working on pharaonic tombs during the period of the New Kingdom, Nakhtsobk, the self-described “scribe of the necropolis,” complains to Amennakhte, a workman, about being neglected. “It is only to me that you don’t send anything whatsoever, really this is a rotten day,” Nakhtsobk writes. “What offense have I done against you? Aren’t I your old eating companion?” In another letter from the same village, the sender, possibly Nakhtsobk, writes dejectedly, “It is I who write to you continually, but you never write to me.”
The first lines spoken by the old shepherd in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale are, “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.”
Puréed applesauce—the first food eaten in outer space, by John Glenn in 1962. Shrimp cocktail, macaroni and cheese, candy-coated peanuts, Metamucil wafers—among what he ate thirty-six years later aboard the spaceship Discovery.
Since opening in 2009, the fifty-eight-story Millennium Tower, which offers multimillion-dollar condos in San Francisco’s Financial District and won several awards for structural engineering, has sunk sixteen inches and tilted six inches toward its neighbor. Developers blame a transit hub under construction next door; the transit authority denies responsibility. “San Francisco is not going to bail anyone out,” the city supervisor has said. “It’s not our problem.”
Researchers working with the Tsimané of the Amazon found that tribe members could tell the difference between consonance and dissonance but took them to be equally pleasant, giving credence to the idea that Western preference for consonance is not biological. “The Greeks were really into ratios,” speculated the lead researcher. “It’s possible they started making music that way and we’ve been stuck with it ever since.”
The first mass extinction on earth occurred around 2.5 billion years ago, when a photosynthesizing bacterium appeared and released so much oxygen into the atmosphere that anaerobic life was largely wiped out. This is often called the Great Oxygenation Event, the Oxygen Catastrophe, or the Oxygen Holocaust.
“The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a 2018 interview with legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”
When Apple released its Shuffle feature for iPods, users were deceived by the true randomness of its playback; songs from the same album or artist were often grouped by chance. Complaints led Steve Jobs to alter the device’s programming and begin offering Smart Shuffle, which allowed users to adjust the likelihood of hearing similar songs in a row. “We’re making it less random,” he said, “to make it feel more random.”
In 480 bc, with the Persian army on the cusp of defeating Greece, Athenian general Themistocles sent a trusted slave to convey a message to Persian king Xerxes; the note professed allegiance to Persia and reported many Greek ships prepared to defect. The Persians, acting hastily on this false intelligence, sailed into the Strait of Salamis, where the Greek fleet was waiting and gained a decisive victory.