Now this probably has only tangential relevance to labor law compliance, but today (Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013) marks the fifth annual celebration of Ada Lovelace Day.
Daughter of the poet Lord Byron (illegitimately), Ms. Lovelace penned what techies have come to recognize as the world's first computer program. In 1842!
She was asked by her friend, mathematician Charles Babbage, to translate some notes from French to English on his proposed "Analytical Machine," itself a sort of ur-computer, though one that never got built.
Ms. Lovelace indeed translated the notes but at the same time wrote an algorithm, never tested, that would allow the Analytical Machine to compute a complex series of numbers known as the Bernoulli numbers. For her work, Babbage christened her "The Enchantress of Numbers."
Her spells didn't work for her when she decided to use numbers to make money through gambling, however. She merely ended up deeply in debt.
On Dec. 10, 2012, on what would have been her 197th birthday, Google featured a Doodle for her on its search page (pictured above).