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Yesterday I corrected a stranger's pronunciation in a queue, went home to check, and found the mistake was mine. |
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A 22-year-old spent 70 hours redoing an 1880 memory experiment |
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Joeri Dros, then 22, spent 70 hours learning lists of nonsense syllables and relearning them after delays running from 20 minutes to 31 days. He was replicating the classic forgetting curve from 1880, which Hermann Ebbinghaus had measured on himself, and he was also a co-author of the 2015 paper that reported the result, with Jaap Murre at the University of Amsterdam. The measure is called savings: the relative amount of time saved on the second learning trial because of the first. The results were similar to Ebbinghaus's original data. One person repeating one person's experiment is thin evidence, so I lean on the wider record. In 1996 David Rubin and Amy Wenzel pooled 210 published data sets of amount remembered against time, all smooth enough to fit, and the best fits were the logarithmic function, the power function and two square-root variants, curves that drop steeply at first and then level off. What irritates me is how tidy the curve looks on a slide, because the data are less smooth. Murre and Dros found that retention after a day or two came out higher than expected, a jump upwards starting at the 24-hour point. They suggested sleep, and noted that for this kind of experiment it remains to be established. |
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Monopoly's ancestor came with rules for monopolists and anti-monopolists |
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Monopoly's ancestor was patented in 1904 by Lizzie Magie, a stenographer in Washington, D.C., who had patented a typewriter gadget in 1893. She wrote two sets of rules for it, "monopolist" and "anti-monopolist". Her stated goal was to demonstrate the evils of accruing vast sums of wealth, and in 1906 she told a reporter she hoped people would soon discover they were poor because "Carnegie and Rockefeller, maybe, have more than they know what to do with." The Landlord's Game, as she called it, will look familiar. The square board had nine rectangular spaces on each side, set between corners labeled "Go to Jail" and "Public Park", and players circled it buying railroads, collecting money and paying rent. In 1935 Parker Brothers bought a Quaker version of the game from Charles Darrow, who was credited publicly as the inventor. It paid Magie $500 for the rights to her Landlord's Game. |
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Lesotho's lowest point is higher than Britain's tallest mountain |
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Where the Orange River, called the Senqu in Lesotho, flows out of the country, its bed sits 1,381 metres above sea level. Guinness World Records lists Lesotho as the country with the highest low point. Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain, was remeasured by Ordnance Survey in 2016 at 1,344.527 metres, up from 1,344 in 1949. In Ordnance Survey's words, the extra centimetres meant they needed "to round up rather than down", to 1,345. Lesotho's lowest point is therefore about 36 metres higher than the top of Ben Nevis. Water is the other thing Lesotho sends downhill. Since 1998 the Lesotho Highlands Water Project has been transferring water from reservoirs in the Lesotho highlands, Katse among them, into South Africa's Vaal River system, which serves Gauteng province. After Phase 1B was completed in 2004, supply to the Vaal Dam from the project rose by 180 million cubic metres to 780 million, according to The New Humanitarian. |
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A clothes iron solved the problem of attaching the magnetic stripe |
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Forrest Parry's problem in the early 1960s was how to attach a stripe of magnetised tape to a plastic card, and the answer came from an iron. According to IBM's own history, his wife, who happened to be ironing clothing at the time, suggested he use the iron to melt the stripe onto the card, and it worked. Parry, an IBM engineer, wanted a more secure identity card for CIA officials. IBM later led the standards work, under project manager Jerome Svigals, and the approach was adopted as a US standard in 1969 and as an international standard two years later. IBM says that, combined with point-of-sale devices, data networks and mainframe computers, the stripe became the catalyst for the global credit card industry. Cards are now swiped through readers more than 50 billion times a year, even as chip cards begin to replace the stripe. |
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The September that never ended was named before AOL reached Usenet |
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Dave Fischer wrote in January 1994, on a Usenet newsgroup called alt.folklore.computers, that September 1993 would go down in net history as "the September that never ended." AOL did not open its Usenet gateway until early 1994, after he posted. The phrase refers to an annual cycle. Each September, incoming college freshmen got Usenet access through their universities and posted the same questions again. Another poster, Billy Chambless, had noted that same month that "september threads" were routinely started by freshmen every year. Kevin Driscoll of the University of Virginia points out that AOL was not the first source of such frustration, since earlier gateways to FidoNet and CompuServe had raised similar worries from the late 1980s. So the line that became shorthand for AOL ruining everything was written before AOL's users arrived. Nostalgia for the old internet is older than the thing it blames. |
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I would retell the Lesotho one, mostly because Ben Nevis never sees it coming. |
