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On Monday I corrected a stranger's pronunciation of a word, and the stranger was right. |
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Sleeping somewhere new keeps part of the brain on watch |
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Sleep labs have a name for the bad first night: the first-night effect. In 2016, Masako Tamaki and colleagues at Brown University tested 35 healthy volunteers and reported that the left side of the default mode network, a set of regions linked to mind-wandering, stayed more aroused on the first night while the rest of the brain slept more deeply. On that night the volunteers were also more likely to respond to beeps played during sleep. The extra responsiveness faded once the lab became familiar. Tidy stories like this one make me irritable, because a single lab's result gets retold as settled fact. The same group saw the left-right asymmetry again in 2019, in a small sample of 11 usable sleepers. A later study followed 124 healthy adults across two nights in a sleep laboratory. Time to fall asleep, total sleep time and sleep efficiency did not differ between nights. Night one did contain more light stage 1 sleep and less of stages 2 and 3. So in the larger sample the first night changed the shape of sleep and left its quantity alone, and a 2024 review in Sleep Research names the default mode network among the mechanisms involved. Whether the left hemisphere does the watching is the part I would like a few more labs to confirm. My own first night in any hotel remains bad, and I have now read the literature on why. |
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The woman who fell 10,160 metres was not on the roster |
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Vesna Vulović was not rostered to work JAT Yugoslav Airlines flight 367 on 26 January 1972. Guinness says the airline had confused her with another stewardess who shared her first name, and she boarded in Copenhagen with the secondary cabin crew. The DC-9, flying from Stockholm to Belgrade, exploded over Czechoslovakia, and she fell 33,333 feet, or 10,160 metres, and survived. Guinness World Records lists it as the highest fall survived without a parachute, and says flight data from the black boxes confirmed the height. She spent the following days in a coma, had no memory of the crash, and walked again after ten months, with a permanent limp. Her own verdict, quoted by Guinness: "I am like a cat, I have had nine lives." In 1985, Guinness says, Paul McCartney presented her with a certificate and medal at its Hall of Fame ceremony. |
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Canada and Denmark settled a whisky war by splitting a rock |
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For years, Canadian and Danish visitors to Hans Island took turns leaving bottles there: Canadians left whisky and Danes left schnapps. The Canadian Encyclopedia calls it a good-natured whisky war. The island is about 1.2 square kilometres of rock in the Nares Strait, between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. A 1973 treaty set a maritime boundary through the strait, but the countries could not agree who owned the island. In 1984 Denmark's minister for Greenlandic affairs, Tom Hoeyem, planted a Danish flag there, and Canada protested. CBC quoted the journalist Martin Breum calling the island worthless, with no minerals or oil nearby. On 14 June 2022 the two countries signed an agreement in Ottawa dividing the island roughly in half along a natural rift. Canada now shares an official land border with a European country. Mélanie Joly, Canada's foreign minister, said it was "the friendliest of all wars," according to CBC. |
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The pulse oximeter began as noise a researcher wanted to remove |
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In 1972 Takuo Aoyagi, an R&D manager at the Japanese medical electronics company Nihon Kohden, was working on a noninvasive way to measure cardiac output. His setup put a dye densitometer on the earlobe, and the readings were spoiled by a pulsing signal from arterial blood. He found that this pulsatile noise contained information about the oxygen in the blood. The cardiac output device never became practical, and that project ended. The noise became the product. A pulse oximeter shines light of two wavelengths through a fingertip or earlobe and uses the changing absorbance at each to isolate the arterial blood. IEEE Spectrum wrote in his 2020 obituary that all of today's oximeters are based on his principles. Minolta, working independently, filed its own patent in April 1974 and began selling a fingertip oximeter in June 1977, according to the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation. |
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In four health forums, a few posters wrote most posts |
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The 1% rule says that in an online community about 90 per cent of people only read, 9 per cent contribute occasionally, and 1 per cent produce most of what is there. The 2014 paper that tested it describes the rule as informal cyberculture with very little empirical research behind it. The author, Trevor van Mierlo of Henley Business School at the University of Reading, published it in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. He examined four long-running, moderated forums covering problem drinking, depression, panic disorder and smoking cessation: 63,990 people and 578,349 posts. Fewer than a quarter of people posted even once. The most active group, labelled superusers, wrote 74.7 per cent of posts on average, and the paper concluded that the 1% rule held in all four. His practical conclusion was that recruiting and keeping superusers is critical to a network like this, since they supply the fresh content. Whether newsletters follow the same ratio is untested, though I suspect the reply button knows. |
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The whisky and schnapps on Hans Island is the one I would retell at dinner. |
