Computer bugs and worms

The first known computer bug was a real bug. It was a moth that got stuck inside the enormous inner workings of an early computer in 1947.

On September 9, 1947,  Grace Murray Hopper recorded this first computer bug in her log book as she worked on the Harvard Mark II.

The problem was traced to a moth stuck between a relay in the machine. After "debugging" the computer, Hopper taped the moth into the Mark II's log book with the explanation: “First actual case of bug being found.”

The first computer worm was invented by John Brunner. It did not occur inside a computer program, but in his 1975 science fiction novel, The Shockwave Rider.

He called it a “tapeworm,” since it worked in a way similar to that fleshy parasite. It was the first description of a set of computer codes that moves from one computer to another on a network as a coherent entity.

A computer worm is a standalone malware computer program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers. Often, it uses a computer network to spread itself, relying on security failures on the target computer to access it.

It differs from a computer virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, even if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer. 

On November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell University computer science graduate student, unleashed what became known as the Morris worm, disrupting a large number of computers then on the Internet, guessed at the time to be one-tenth of all those connected.

NIMBY

NIMBY is an acronym meaning "Not In My BackYard." It appears in stories about a neighborhood protesting the location of a new unwanted project in their area.

Many such "undesirable" projects are attached to its use. A list on Wikipedia includs: low cost housing development, skyscrapers, homeless shelters, oil wells, chemical plants, industrial parks, military bases, fracking, wind turbines, desalination plants, landfill sites, incinerators, power plants, quarries, prisons, pubs, adult entertainment clubs, firearms dealers, mobile phone masts, electricity pylons, abortion clinics, children's homes, nursing homes, youth hostels, sports stadiums, betelnut vendors, shopping malls, retail parks, railways, roads, airports, seaports, nuclear waste repositories, storage for weapons of mass destruction, and cannabis dispensaries and recreational cannabis shops.

Whether it is a new garbage dump or energy plant, this acronym is a pejorative characterization of opposition by residents. Often that opposition is not to the need for such facilities, but just that it should be further away from their neighborhood. The residents are often called Nimbies and their state of mind is called Nimbyism.

The NIMBY concept i sometimes also applied to people who advocate a proposal, such as budget cuts, but oppose implementing it in a way that might affect their lives or require any sacrifice on their part.

The acronym's earliest use is listed as being in 1980 in the Christian Science Monitor. However, the OED  notes that the term was already used in the hazardous waste industry. It is probable that people were using the phrase "Not in my backyard" much earlier than the acronym.

algorithm and algebra

Flow chart of an algorithm (Euclid's algorithm)
for calculating the greatest common divisor 

In this time steeped in computers, the engine under the surface of this website and much of the technology we use is full of mathematics and computer science. That means it uses algorithms. I just read a story today about how facebook is tweaking its algorithms for what we see in our feed. What is all this about and where did it come from?

Without getting too complicated, an algorithm is a self-contained step-by-step set of operations to be performed. Algorithms can perform calculations, process data and automate reasoning.

The concept and origin of the word goes back centuries. The words 'algorithm' and 'algorism' come from the name al-Khwārizmī. Al-Khwārizmī (Persian: خوارزمی‎‎, c. 780-850) and from Algoritmi, the Latin form of his name.

He was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and scholar. The importance of al-Khwārizmī's contributions to mathematics can also be seen in "algebra" (derived from al-jabr, one of the two operations he used to solve quadratic equations. His name is also the origin of (Spanish) guarismo and of (Portuguese) algarismo, both meaning digit.

Baseball's Dodgers

Of all the American baseball team names, the Dodgers may have the oddest nickname.

Today, they are the Los Angeles Dodgers, members of the National League West division of Major League Baseball (MLB), but their origin goes back more than a hundred years to Brooklyn, New York. But those beloved Brooklyn Dodgers went through a series of name changes.

Brooklyn Dodgers logo of 1910-1913

The Dodgers were originally founded in 1883 as the Brooklyn Atlantics, taking the name of a defunct team that had played in Brooklyn before them. The team joined the American Association in 1884 and won the AA championship in 1889 before joining the National League in 1890.

They promptly won the NL Championship their first year in the League.

They were called the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers in 1895. The nickname came from the busy streets surrounding where they sometimes played (they moved a lot) and the dangerous dodging of newly-electrified and faster trolley cars and traffic in general in that New York City borough. That name was still new enough in September 1895 that a newspaper could report that, "'Trolley Dodgers' is the new name which eastern baseball cranks [fans] have given the Brooklyn club."

They had played at a number of parks and were then at Eastern Park, where there weren't any trolley lines, only the elevated railway. The name was soon shortened to Brooklyn Dodgers.

But other team names were used by the franchise that would finally be called "the Dodgers" and the list included some really odd ones: the Grooms, the Bridegrooms, Ward's Wonders, the Superbas and the Robins. These nicknames were used by fans and newspaper sports writers to describe the team, but not officially adopted by the team whose legal name was the Brooklyn Base Ball Club.

In 1932, the word "Dodgers" appeared on team jerseys and the following year it appeared on both home and road jerseys.

In Brooklyn, the Dodgers won the NL pennant twelve times and the World Series in 1955.

The first major-league baseball game to be televised was Brooklyn vs. Cincinnati at Ebbets Field on August 26, 1939. Batting helmets were introduced to Major League Baseball by the Dodgers in 1941.

But Jackie Robinson's story may be the most famous Brooklyn Dodgers story. For most of the first half of the 20th century, no Major League Baseball team employed a black player. I the Negro Leagues, players were denied a chance to prove their skill before a national audience. Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play Major League baseball in the 20th Century when he played his first major league game on April 15, 1947 as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

General Manager Branch Rickey was the key to Robinson's entry and his motivation was both moral (He was a member of the Methodist Church, the antecedent denomination to The United Methodist Church of today, which was a strong advocate for social justice and active later in the Civil Rights Movement.) and a business consideration.

Real estate businessman Walter O'Malley had acquired majority ownership of the Dodgers in 1950 when he bought the shares of team co-owners Branch Rickey and the estate of the late John L. Smith. He had been working to buy new land in Brooklyn for a new, more accessible and better ballpark than Ebbets Field, which was beloved but outdated.

He was offered a site in Flushing Meadows, Queens, but passed as it was planned to include a city-built, city-owned park. The site was the eventual location of Shea Stadium, home of the NY Mets.

O'Malley decided to look outside New York. Los Angeles officials attended the 1956 World Series looking to bring a team home and originally targeted the Washington Senators. (The Senators did eventually move in 1961 to become the Minnesota Twins.)

About the same time, the owner of the baseball NY Giants was also looking for a new ballpark and having a tough time. Their equally antiquated home stadium, the Polo Grounds was unsuitable for updating and, finding no NY real estate, the team moved to San Francisco.

The Brooklyn Dodgers played their final game at Ebbets Field on September 24, 1957, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates. But the Brooklyn version of the team still has fans, as is evidenced by the vintage and reproduction memorabilia still sold today - and especially popular in Brooklyn.

The team moved to Los Angeles and on April 18, 1958, the Los Angeles Dodgers played their first game in L.A., defeating the former New York and newly relocated and renamed San Francisco Giants, 6–5, before 78,672 fans at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. They played for four seasons at the Coliseum before moving to their current home of Dodger Stadium.

Though there were no trolleys to dodge in Los Angeles, there certainly was plenty of freeway traffic.

God Bless You and the Sneeze

God bless you (also "God bless" or "Bless you")is a common English response to to a sneeze.

The phrase has been used, not for sneezes, in the Hebrew Bible by Jews (cf. Numbers 6:24), and by Christians, since the time of the early Church. Generally, it was meant as a benediction, as well as a means of bidding a person "Godspeed," an expression of good wishes or good luck to a departing person or a person beginning a journey.

During the plague of AD 590, Pope Gregory I ordered unceasing prayer for divine intercession. Part of his command was that anyone sneezing be blessed immediately by saying "God bless you." Sneezing was often the first sign that someone was falling ill with the plague.

By 750, during a plague outbreak or not, it became customary to say "God bless you" as a response to one sneezing. It was once thought that sneezing was an omen of death, since many dying people fell into sneezing fits.

Not all sneezing had negative connotations. Later, the Hebrew Talmud called sneezing “pleasure sent from God.”  The Greeks and Romans believed that sneezing was a good omen and responded to sneezes with “Long may you live!” or “May you enjoy good health.” 

It is still seen as a sign of good fortune or God's beneficence in some cultures, as seen in the German word Gesundheit (meaning "health") sometimes adopted by English speakers, and the Irish word sláinte (meaning "good health"), the Spanish salud (also meaning "health") and the Hebrew laBri'ut (colloquial) or liVriut (classic) (both spelled: "לבריאות") (meaning "to health").

See also:  wikipedia.org/wiki/Responses_to_sneezing