Somebody has been leaving small stones on my windowsill and I have decided not to look into it.

The fog after waking can last longer than it feels

Sleep researchers call the fog after waking sleep inertia, and one result in a 2019 review by Hilditch and McHill made me put my coffee down. In one study the review describes, volunteers who had just woken from a 30-minute nap rated their performance as better during the very period when it measured worse.

Studies comparing performance with pre-sleep levels typically find recovery within 30 minutes, sometimes as soon as 15. More systematic measures put full recovery at an hour or later. The longest result involved an addition task that took up to three and a half hours to recover, with a caveat: people were waking at their habitual morning time, so the body clock's own morning rise cannot be separated out. The review's summary says the impairment can be equivalent to, or greater than, that seen after up to 40 hours of sleep deprivation.

The biohacking crowd has one move here with support behind it: caffeine just before a nap of about 20 minutes, which the review calls the most effective proactive countermeasure. Caffeine after waking, even as fast-acting gum, did not touch the first and worst stretch. I now treat my own sense of being awake as a witness with an interest in the outcome.

A meteorite hit a napping woman and her landlady wanted it

On 30 November 1954, Ann Hodges was napping on the sofa of her rented home in Sylacauga, Alabama, when an 8.5-pound meteorite came through the roof. It struck a radio console and bounced onto her, leaving a large bruise on her left side, and her landlady, Birdie Guy, soon claimed the rock was hers.

The Air Force took the rock away to confirm what it was. Guy sued for possession, having been advised that landowners own meteorites, and the Hodges threatened a countersuit over Ann's injuries. It settled before trial and the Hodges kept the rock. Smithsonian Magazine says her husband could not find a buyer, so the family used it as a doorstop before donating it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

A second piece was found in the middle of a dirt road the next day by a farmer, Julius McKinney, who sold it to the Smithsonian for enough to buy a small farm and a used car, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Nepal's constitution includes instructions for drawing the flag

Article 8 of Nepal's 2015 constitution describes the national flag in words and then hands the rest to a schedule: the method of drawing it is set out in Schedule 1. That suits a flag made of two stacked triangular pennants, crimson with a deep blue border, which Britannica says makes Nepal the only country in the modern world without a rectangular flag.

The constitution specifies the emblems: a white crescent moon above, with eight rays visible out of sixteen, and a white twelve-rayed sun below. Britannica says the present design was established under the constitution of 16 December 1962, and that the symbols, linked to different dynasties, express the hope that the country will last as long as the sun and moon. According to Britannica, the sun and moon originally had faces, in red, and the current flag leaves them out.

The first photocopy copied a glass slide marked Astoria

The first photocopy was a copy of a glass slide on which someone had written "10-22-38 ASTORIA" in India ink. Chester Carlson and his assistant Otto Kornei made it in Astoria, Queens, on 22 October 1938, by charging a sulfur-coated zinc plate, exposing it through the slide and dusting it with powder.

I had assumed a corporate lab invented the photocopier, but Carlson worked in patent departments, including at Bell Laboratories, according to The Henry Ford. He wrote to more than 20 office-equipment companies, including IBM, RCA, General Electric and Remington Rand, and the University of Rochester says they showed at best perfunctory interest. The Xerox 914, named for its 9-by-14-inch copy size, arrived in 1959. It weighed 650 pounds and was the first fully automatic office copier to use ordinary paper. Within three years, The Henry Ford says, Xerox had sold 10,000 of them, double its goal of 5,000.

An early webcam watched a coffee pot to save people stairs

Coffee club members at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory kept climbing several flights of stairs to find that the all-night hackers in the Trojan Room had already taken the fresh pot. In late 1991, researchers there, including Paul Jardetzky and Quentin Stafford-Fraser, pointed a camera at the pot and put its image on their screens.

In November 1993, Dan Gordon and Martyn Johnson connected it to the web, and Cambridge's own timeline calls XCoffee the first webcam. The images were greyscale, which Stafford-Fraser wrote was "fine, because so was the coffee." Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed the pot, he says, most of them well out of cup range.

The longest-serving pot was auctioned on eBay in August 2001 to raise money for coffee facilities in the new lab, and Spiegel Online bought it for £3,350. The camera was switched off at 10:54 on 22 August 2001.

The Hodges meteorite is the one I would retell at dinner.