Two random events inspired me to write this post. The first is that Toby Cubitt gave a talk at IQC recently. (I didn’t attend the talk, but I did receive the announcement.) The second is that I chanced upon the book Quirkology by psychologist Richard Wiseman. (Another influence for this post is the fact that job hunting is clearly still on my mind.)
In high school, a friend and I had noticed that several of the people we had to learn about in class had names which were oddly apropos of the accomplishments for which they were famous, and so we started to compile a list. At the head of the list was Robert Boyle, who studied the inverse relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of an ideal gas at a fixed temperature. Another name on the list was Alexander Graham Bell. (“You rang?”)… » [Expand post] [Permalink]