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I have thirty-four browser tabs open right now and no plan to close a single one. |
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Eleven thousand brains got better at exactly one thing |
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Eleven thousand four hundred and thirty people spent six weeks training their brains for a BBC science show, and by the end nearly all of them were sharply better at one thing: the exact task they had practiced. That trial, run by the neuroscientist Adrian Owen and colleagues and published in Nature in 2010, remains the largest test brain training has ever received. It found no transfer to untrained tasks, even ones that shared the same underlying cognitive skill. A working memory game made people better at that specific game and left their actual working memory, tested a different way, untouched. The same shape of result shows up in the wider literature. A 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, led by the psychologist Daniel Simons and six colleagues, went through the peer-reviewed brain-training literature and reached a similar conclusion: training helps with the exact tasks practiced, evidence for related tasks is much weaker, and evidence for everyday cognitive performance is minimal. What stays with me is how familiar the shape of it feels from the inside. My field keeps producing versions of the same finding: a trained skill sharpens, and whatever people hoped would come along with it stays put. The paper's own last line was blunter than mine: it said the belief that brain training improves general mental function lacks empirical support, despite a multimillion-pound industry built on selling exactly that belief. |
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Bubble Wrap was invented as wallpaper for the Beat Generation |
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In 1957 a Swiss chemist named Marc Chavannes and an engineer named Alfred Fielding ran two plastic shower curtains through a heat-sealing machine, trying to make textured wallpaper trendy enough for the Beat Generation. What came out instead was a sheet of plastic studded with trapped air bubbles. The wallpaper flopped, and so did their backup idea, greenhouse insulation. Fielding and Chavannes patented the process anyway and brainstormed more than four hundred possible uses for their odd plastic sheets before any of them stuck. The real market showed up in 1961, four years later, under the name they had already given their new company: Sealed Air. IBM had just released the 1401, its first mass-market computer, and the machines needed cushioning on their way to customers. The bubbles built to sell apartments ended up shipping mainframes instead. Every strip I've popped since finding this out feels like popping a rejected wallpaper sample, which is a strange thing to know before a flight. |
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The Diomede Islands are three miles apart and a day apart |
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Little Diomede Island belongs to the United States. Big Diomede Island belongs to Russia, and sits just three point eight kilometers away, close enough to see on a clear day. The two islands are separated by the Bering Strait and, more strangely, by the International Date Line, which runs directly between them. Step outside on Little Diomede and look west, and you are looking at tomorrow. Because the International Date Line runs between the two islands, Big Diomede's calendar sits a full day ahead of its neighbor's, even though the two are close enough to see clearly across the water. A phone call placed on a Tuesday afternoon in Alaska is answered on a Wednesday in Russia. I have crossed three time zones on a transatlantic flight and still felt less disoriented than the idea of two islands living an entire day apart from each other. |
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A study of postcards decided how long your texts could be |
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Friedhelm Hillebrand chaired a working group at the body setting the standards for a new mobile phone network, and in 1985 he was handed a narrow technical question: how long could a short wireless message usefully be. He answered it by counting characters, measuring the length of typical postcards and telex messages, the two everyday formats people already used to say something briefly. Postcards, he found, usually ran under 150 characters. Telex operators already worked within similar limits. Hillebrand added a small buffer and proposed a hard cap of 160 characters, and the standards body adopted it. That number became the technical backbone of SMS: for decades afterward, a message over the limit was simply split into two. Every time I trim a text down to fit, I am still working inside a limit one engineer set by counting postcards forty-one years ago. |
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The internet law that predicts when Hitler gets mentioned |
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Mike Godwin was a young lawyer in 1990, tired of watching online arguments collapse the same way every time. Whenever a Usenet thread ran long enough, on any topic at all, somebody would eventually compare the other side to Hitler or the Nazis. Godwin decided to test whether he could make that pattern visible by giving it a name. He started seeding threads with the observation itself, and watched it spread through Usenet the way the thing it described already did. He called it Godwin's Law: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches certainty. He first wrote it up for Wired magazine in 1994, and the joke never really faded. It named something the internet already did constantly and had simply gone unnoticed. In 2012 the Oxford English Dictionary added it as a real entry, dictionary definition and all, which means a joke about arguing on the internet is now more official than most of the arguments it describes. |
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The Diomede Islands are the fact I keep bringing up unprompted. |
