is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. This idea is known as Brooks’s law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.
is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.
"Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (31 October 1828 – 27 May 1914) was a British physicist and chemist, most famous for the invention of the incandescent light bulb for which he received the first patent in 1878. His house was the first in the world to be lit by a lightbulb."
"Despite its name, a significant amount of computer science does not involve the study of computers themselves."
"The term kaizen, is a Japanese word adopted into English referring to a philosophy or practices focusing on continuous improvement in manufacturing activities, business activities in general, and even life in general, depending on interpretation and usage."
"The Great Man theory is a philosophical theory that aims to explain history by the impact of “great men”, or heroes: highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or Machiavellianism, used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact. For example, a scholarly follower of the Great Man theory would be likely to study the Second World War by focusing on the big personalities of the conflict – Sir Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Charles de Gaulle (Allies); Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, (Axis); et al. – and view all of the historical events as being tied directly to their own individual decisions and orders."
"Geosmin, which literally translates to “earth smell”, is an organic compound with a distinct earthy flavour and aroma, and is responsible for the earthy taste of beets and a contributor to the strong scent that occurs in the air when rain falls after a dry spell of weather (petrichor). The human nose is extremely sensitive to geosmin and is able to detect it at concentrations as low as 5 parts per trillion."
"The beard-second is a unit of length inspired by the light year, but used for extremely short distances such as those in nuclear physics. The beard-second is defined as the length an average beard grows in a second, or about 5 nanometers[1]. One beard-second equals 50 Ångströms (10-10 m)."
— Beard-second - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia discovered via reddit.com
