(Roughly) Daily

Happy New Year!

In the spirit of Tom Whitwell’s lists, Jason Kottke‘s collection of learnings from 2023-gone-by…

Purple Heart medals that were made for the planned (and then cancelled) invasion of Japan in 1945 are still being given out to wounded US military personnel.

The San Francisco subway system still runs on 5 1/4-inch floppies.

Bottled water has an expiration date — it’s the bottle not the water that expires.

Multicellular life developed on Earth more than 25 separate times.

Horseshoe crabs are older than Saturn’s rings.

Ernest Hemingway only used 59 exclamation points across his entire collection of works.

MLB broadcaster Vin Scully’s career lasted 67 seasons, during which he called a game managed by Connie Mack (born in 1862) and one Julio Urías (born in 1996) played in.

Almost 800,000 Maryland licence plates include a URL that now points to an online casino in the Philippines because someone let the domain registration lapse.

Dozens more at: “52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023.”

* Arnold Palmer

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As we live and learn, we might spare a thought for Grace Brewster Murray Hopper; she died on this date in 1992.  A seminal computer scientist and Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, “Amazing Grace” (as she was known to many in her field) was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer (in 1944), invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and was one of the leaders in popularizing the concept of machine-independent programming languages– which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.

Hopper also (inadvertently) contributed one of the most ubiquitous metaphors in computer science: she found and documented the first computer “bug” (in 1947).

She has both a ship (the guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper) and a super-computer (the Cray XE6 “Hopper” at NERSC) named in her honor.

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