Sunday, July 30, 2006

Spotlight
Parkinson's Law states: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." Having spent time working in the British Civil Service, C. Northcote Parkinson developed a cynical philosophy on bureaucracies and their efficiency, and wrote about it in his book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress. He writes of the (in)efficiency of committees in his definition of a coefficient of inefficiency. Parkinson, born on this date in 1909, also wrote novels set in the nautical world, including the Richard Delancey series and The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower.

Quote
"'The Law of Triviality'... briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved." – C. Northcote Parkinson

Today in History

• Baltimore: port town and industrial center was founded (1729)
• paperback: soft-cover books were first published by Penguin in England (1935)
• double agent: Soviet news service announced that Kim Philby, British intelligence officer and Soviet spy, had defected to the USSR (1963)
• Medicare: insurance program for senior citizens was signed into US law (1965)

Today's Birthdays

• Emily Brontë: author of Wuthering Heights (1818-1848)
• Henry Ford: inventor who popularized mass production with the Ford Motor Company, Model-T car (1863-1947)
• Arnold Schwarzenegger: Calif. governor, former actor (59)
• Laurence Fishburne: Morpheus in The Matrix (45)