In 1891, at the 10th International Medical Conference, Professor Themistocles Glück of Germany presented the results of an experiment in which he used ivory to replace the femoral head (the “ball” part of the ball-and-socket) of human patients with deteriorated hip joints.
In his 1991 song “Better Class of Losers,” Randy Travis sang that his kind of people were not those who “pay their bills on home computers.” At that time—before the World Wide Web—paying bills on home computers was revolutionary, available only on online services such as AOL and CompuServe.
In the 1890s, a German math teacher by the name of Wilhelm von Osten was convinced that his horse, named Hans, was capable of counting, addition, subtraction, square roots—in short, all manner of math problems. Von Osten would ask Hans a math question, and Hans would tap out the answer with one of his hooves. (Obviously, Hans was limited to positive integers.)
By and large, computer programmers are, by both nature and necessity, a detail-oriented bunch. It takes someone who can get down into the weeds, the world of bits and bytes, of ones and zeroes, to craft an effective program to make a computer do something useful.
Once upon a time, photography was all about delayed gratification. You couldn’t see the results of your efforts until you had taken the film someplace to be developed and printed—a process that could take a day or more. And if you didn’t take many pictures, the roll of film might stay in your camera for months before you finished the roll and took it in for processing. If the photos were out of focus, too light, too dark, or poorly composed, you were out of luck.
The world of business is rife with buzzwords. Some self-proclaimed business guru comes up with a clever term for a concept that forward-thinking businesses ought to adopt, and suddenly companies large and small start dropping that term into their mission statements, business plans, and marketing materials. Examples that have fallen into and out of vogue in recent years include “synergy,” “game changer,” “thought leader,” “move the needle,” and “right-size.”
