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I left a beaker of coffee in the lab fridge back in June and only found it again this week, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of my other experiments. |
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A meta-analysis pooling two million people ties naps to dementia risk |
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In my inbox, the biohacking crowd sees a twenty-minute nap the way other people see a multivitamin, harmless, obviously good, worth defending on principle. A meta-analysis published in Sleep Medicine in November 2023 pooled twenty studies and nearly two million older adults, and it complicates that. Naps longer than thirty minutes were linked to a 35 percent higher chance of a later dementia diagnosis. Naps past sixty minutes, a 41 percent higher chance. Short naps carried none of that association. A separate study out of UCSF and Harvard followed 1,401 seniors for as long as fourteen years and caught something the pooled numbers cannot show: napping habits change before a diagnosis does. People who moved from napping under an hour to over an hour a day had a 40 percent higher chance of a later Alzheimer's diagnosis, and after diagnosis, daily napping grew by roughly another hour. The authors are explicit that they cannot say which direction causes which. None of this makes naps something to fear, and neither team claims it does. The more useful reading takes a long nap as an early sign of change in the brain, not a cause of it. What stays with me is how ordinary that sign looks from the outside, indistinguishable from just needing a rest. |
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A king fixed the barrel size oil still uses |
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The number on every oil price ticker traces back to a wine cask. In the 1480s, King Richard III fixed a cask called a tierce at forty-two gallons, sized so a full one weighed close to three hundred pounds, about as much as one person could lift. Coopers used that tierce for wine, herring, molasses, and whale oil for centuries before anyone pumped a barrel of crude, and twenty fit on a railroad flatcar. When Edwin Drake's well came in near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, producers filled whatever casks were on hand, mostly whiskey and wine barrels. Within a year, a magazine piece described oil barrels as holding forty-two gallons. Producers made it official at Titusville in August 1866, and the Petroleum Producers Association adopted it in 1872. Oil has not moved in a wooden barrel in generations; it travels by pipeline and tanker. The wine trade that shaped it is gone, but the ticker still runs on one king's idea of a stranger's shoulder, five centuries on. |
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One border town decided nationality by where a front door sits |
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In the Dutch-Belgian town of Baarle, a house belongs to whichever country its front door opens into. The rule sounds tidy until you reach a former seventeenth-century tavern whose door sits exactly on the line, giving it two addresses: Loveren 2 in Belgium and Loveren 19 in the Netherlands. The owners choose which country bills them for water and electricity, and most pick Belgium, where it costs less. The mess started in 1198, when a lord named Godfried van Schoten swapped the town of Breda for scattered plots he had already handed to soldiers, seeding a patchwork the Treaty of Munster made official in 1648. The 1843 border settlement between Belgium and the Netherlands gave up on drawing one continuous line; surveyors just listed which country owned each parcel, leaving a hole in the map unresolved until 1974. During the Second World War, Dutch soldiers occupying that same building had to move their desks across the line into Belgium. Sleeping there was allowed. Working there was not. |
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GPS stayed deliberately blurry for civilians until the year 2000 |
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The story everyone tells about GPS is that Reagan opened it to civilians after the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. That is not quite right. GPS was built as a dual-use system from a 1973 meeting, and Texas Instruments had sold GPS receivers to government surveyors by 1981, two years earlier. What happened fifteen days later was a brief White House statement promising civil access once GPS was operational, in 1988. Even that promise came with a catch: for years, the Pentagon scrambled the public signal, so civilian receivers landed within about a hundred metres of the truth instead of ten. The scrambling ended just after midnight on May 1, 2000, when every satellite switched to full accuracy, and civilian GPS became roughly ten times more precise overnight. The real turning point for your phone's map was that midnight in 2000. The 1983 press statement made a better story, and the policy went permanent in 2007, by which point that story had already won. |
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One sleeping flight turned a small joke into a firing |
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On December 20, 2013, a New York PR executive named Justine Sacco tweeted a joke to her 170 followers before a flight to Cape Town, then switched off her phone for eleven hours with no wifi. Nobody had replied when she took off. A Gawker writer retweeted it to his fifteen thousand followers, and by the time she landed, her name had been searched 1.2 million times against a normal forty a month, and her employer had fired her. Researchers call this context collapse: a platform flattens every audience you have, family, boss, strangers, into one feed, so a joke aimed at nobody gets read by everybody. Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick named it in a 2011 paper on Twitter, building on how television blurred public and private life. Sacco went back to work in New York and keeps a profile too low for anyone to search. The ordinary version is a message written for three people and read by twelve, long before anyone gets eleven hours to regret it. |
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Bring up the tavern with two addresses at dinner tonight; I already have, twice. |
