(Roughly) Daily

From the good folks at Pill Talk, a reminder that today’s illicit drugs were yesterday’s featured pharmaceuticals…  From Black Beauties marketed as a weight loss aid to Bayer’s ad for Heroin (“the sedative for coughs”), readers can see them all here.  (And for more on Heroin’s companion in the Bayer catalog, aspirin, see the almanac portion of the post here.)

As we realize that we still have our coughs but don’t really care, we might remark that today is the birthday of not one but two extraordinary mathematicians:  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646; variants on his date of birth due to calendar changes), the German  philosopher, scientist, mathematician, diplomat, librarian, lawyer, co-inventor, with Newton, of The Calculus, and “hero” of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy…  and  Alan Turing (1912), British mathematician, computer science pioneer (inventor of the Turing Machine, creator of “the Turing Test” and inspiration for “The Turing Prize”) and cryptographer (leading member of the team that cracked the Enigma code during WWII).   Go figure…

Liebnitz (source: UNC)

Turing (source: Univ. of Birmingham)