Bluetooth, a union of different communication protocols, after King Harold Bluetooth, 10th century uniter of Danish tribes.
Things Unexpectedly Named After People
101–110 of 294 posts
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#102"Pilates" recently caught me off guard.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#103Perhaps apropos to this thread: The closest airport to Oracle’s headquarters is San Carlos, which has the airport code SQL. The airport and code were around long before the database company, however.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#104Going down the wiki rabbit hole on this led me to the very sad history of Ian Murdock, founder of Debian (Deb was his girlfriend's name at the time). Apparently he hanged himself in 2015 after a somewhat bizarre tweet storm announcing his suicide.
I have no corroboration for this, it is a personal speculation.
At Sun, Ian Murdock also started an OS project called “Indiana”. I have wondered if this was a happy coincidence that Ian was substring of Indiana. Of course, he also lived in that state.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#105My favourite is the Heaviside function [1], which is named after Oliver Heaviside [2], who just happened to have an appropriate name for a function with one heavy side! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
Or Čech cohomology, usually denoted with the check "v" above characters.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#106The color #663399 is named "rebeccapurple", after Rebecca Meyer, who passed away at age 6. https://css-tricks.com/rebbeccapurple-663399/ was unexpected to me when i first learned CSS, and now is a bittersweet memory i gladly pass on.
Named by Eric Meyer, one of the inventors of CSS. His blog posts on Rebecca are heartbreaking:
https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/rebecca...
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#107PageRank was named after Larry Page? MySQL is named after the one of co-founder's daughter, My? I knew the Debian. but this is mind boggling.
MySQL's fork, MariaBD, is also named after one os Widenius' daughters.
Mariabidet is a good one. This will stick in my head forever! Especially when flushing :)
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#108"Killing Fields" are extremely unfortunately named after a guy named Killing, who lived and died decades before the genocide in Cambodia.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
And young children (and occasionally their parents jocularly imitating them) talk about "hooving" the carpet, because a "hoover" is obviously a machine for "hooving", right?
It behooves those parents to teach them the proper verb.
“Is the FBI in the habit of cleaning up after multiple murders?!!”
“Of course. Why do you think it’s run by a man called Hoover?”
This was a joke in the ‘80s Clue movie; albeit probably funnier to the English writer and the English actor saying the lines, as Hoover as a generecized trademark for vacuum cleaner is more popular there.
Re: Things Unexpectedly Named After People
#110My understanding is that mobile homes are named for Mobile, Alabama, and not for the fact that they are moveable.