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🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 United States/Mississippi

Judge Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat, Jr. (October 2, 1922 – February 23, 1996) was a judge, law professor, and state representative in the U.S. state of Mississippi, notable for his 1952 speech on the floor of the Mississippi state legislature concerning whiskey. Reportedly the speech took Sweat two and a half months to write. The speech is renowned for the grand rhetorical terms in which it seems to come down firmly and decisively on both sides of the question. The speech gave rise to the phrase if-by-whiskey, used to illustrate such equivocation in argument.

🔗 Biography

Jonathan Gillette, known by the pseudonym why the lucky stiff (often abbreviated as _why), is a writer, cartoonist, artist, and programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language. Annie Lowrey described him as "one of the most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers" in the world. Along with Yukihiro Matsumoto and David Heinemeier Hansson, he was seen as one of the key figures in the Ruby community.

_why made a presentation enigmatically titled "A Starry Afternoon, a Sinking Symphony, and the Polo Champ Who Gave It All Up for No Reason Whatsoever" at the 2005 O'Reilly Open Source Convention. It explored how to teach programming and make the subject more appealing to adolescents. _why gave a presentation and performed with his band, the Thirsty Cups, at RailsConf in 2006.

On 19 August 2009, _why's accounts on Twitter and GitHub and his personally maintained websites went offline. Shortly before he disappeared, why the lucky stiff tweeted, "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

_why's colleagues have assembled collections of his writings and projects.

Later his website briefly went back online with a detailed explanation of his plans for the future.

🔗 Biography

Albert Stevens (1887–1966), also known as patient CAL-1, was a victim of a human radiation experiment, and survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with 131 kBq (3.55 µCi) of plutonium without his knowledge or informed consent.

Plutonium remained present in his body for the remainder of his life, the amount decaying slowly through radioactive decay and biological elimination. Stevens died of heart disease some 20 years later, having accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64 Sv (6400 rem) over that period, i.e. an average of 3 Sv per year or 350 μSv/h. The current annual permitted dose for a radiation worker in the United States is 0.05 Sv (or 5 rem), i.e. an average of 5.7 μSv/h.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Catholicism 🔗 Middle Ages/Crusades 🔗 Military history/Crusades 🔗 Belgium 🔗 Christianity/Christianity in China

William of Rubruck (Dutch: Willem van Rubroeck, Latin: Gulielmus de Rubruquis; fl. 1248–1255) was a Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer.

He is best known for his travels to various parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the 13th century, including the Mongol Empire. His account of his travels is one of the masterpieces of medieval travel literature, comparable to those of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky (Russian: Соломон Вениаминович Шерешевский; 1886 – 1 May 1958), also known simply as 'Ш' ('Sh'), 'S.', or Luria's S, was a Soviet journalist and mnemonist active in the 1920s. He was the subject of Alexander Luria's case study The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968).

🔗 Biography 🔗 Latter Day Saint movement

Mark William Hofmann (born December 7, 1954) is an American counterfeiter, forger, and convicted murderer. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished forgers in history, Hofmann is especially noted for his creation of documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement. When his schemes began to unravel, he constructed bombs to murder two people in Salt Lake City, Utah.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 France 🔗 Computing/Software

Fabrice Bellard (French pronunciation: ​[fa.bʁis bɛ.laʁ]) is a computer programmer who created the FFmpeg and QEMU software projects. He has also developed a number of other programs, including the Tiny C Compiler.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Oklahoma

Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ Ssiquoya, as he signed his name, or ᏎᏉᏯ Se-quo-ya, as is often spelled in Cherokee; named in English George Gist or George Guess) (c.1770–1843), was a Native American polymath of the Cherokee Nation. In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible. This was one of the very few times in recorded history that a member of a pre-literate people created an original, effective writing system (another example being Shong Lue Yang). After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. Their literacy rate quickly surpassed that of surrounding European-American settlers.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Virginia

Gladys Brown West (née Gladys Mae Brown; October 27, 1930 – January 17, 2026) was an African American mathematician. She was known for her contributions to mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth, and her work on the development of satellite geodesy models, which were later incorporated into the Global Positioning System (GPS).

West was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018. She was awarded the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the development of satellite geodesy models.