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My neighbour has started practising the trombone at seven in the morning, and I have decided to take it as a compliment. |
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A fifteen-minute lab result became a CD for Georgia's newborns |
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In 1998 Zell Miller, then governor of Georgia, asked his legislature for $105,000 so that babies born in the state could go home with a classical music CD. The legislators hesitated, Sony donated the recordings, and the album handed out through hospitals was called Build Your Baby's Brain Through the Power of Music. That same year, Florida required state-funded day-care centres to play at least an hour of classical music every day. The science behind it was a one-page letter in Nature in 1993. Frances Rauscher and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine reported that college students did better on spatial reasoning items after listening to a Mozart sonata for two pianos. A later write-up from the same group put the duration of the boost at ten to fifteen minutes. Rauscher herself pointed out that nobody had shown casual listening did anything for children. This is the version of my field I find hardest to watch: a small, short-lived effect in undergraduates turned into state policy for infants inside five years. In 2010 a team at the University of Vienna pooled about forty studies and more than 3,000 participants and found no support for spatial gains specifically due to Mozart. They titled the paper Mozart effect-Shmozart effect, and I have never loved a journal article more. |
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OK began as a deliberate misspelling in a Boston newspaper |
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On 23 March 1839 the Boston Morning Post ran a sarcastic piece about a rival editor in Providence and slipped in the letters "o.k.", followed helpfully by "all correct". The joke was the spelling. OK stood for "oll korrect", the kind of wilful misspelling that young, educated Bostonians of the late 1830s found hilarious. It was one fad among several. The same crowd used SP for "small potatoes" and KG for "know go", and those faded. OK was rescued by an election. In 1840 supporters of Martin Van Buren, nicknamed Old Kinderhook after his home town in New York, formed OK Clubs and made the letters a slogan. Van Buren lost anyway. Allen Walker Read, the Columbia scholar who traced all of this in the journal American Speech in the 1960s, first had to clear away theories involving German military ranks, a Haitian port and the Choctaw language. |
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Canada and Denmark fought over an island with bottles of liquor |
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In 1984 Canadian soldiers landed on a bare rock in the Nares Strait, between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, raised a flag and left a bottle of Canadian whisky. Denmark's minister for Greenland affairs responded by swapping in a Danish flag and leaving a bottle in return, with a note: "Welcome to Danish Island." The rock is Hans Island, about 1.2 square kilometres with no vegetation and no wildlife. When the two countries drew their sea boundary through the strait in 1973, they left its status undefined, and for decades both sides kept trading flags and bottles. In June 2022 they split it along a natural ravine running roughly north to south, which gave Canada its first land boundary with Denmark. The agreement also guarantees that Inuit from Nunavut and Greenland, who call the island Tartupaluk, can move freely across the whole of it. |
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QR code corners use the rarest pattern their inventor could find |
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In the early 1990s Masahiro Hara, an engineer at the Japanese car parts maker DENSO, was stuck with the limits of the barcode. A conventional one held about twenty alphanumeric characters and no kanji. His answer, released in 1994, was a square code that could store around 7,000 numerals. The hard part was speed. A scanner had to find the code instantly, from any angle, on a label crowded with other print. Hara photographed newspapers and magazines and left measuring software running around the clock, looking for the black and white proportion that turned up least often. He settled on 1:1:3:1:1, which is why three corners of every QR code carry a small square inside a square. DENSO kept the patent and declared it would never exercise it. Hara compared the decision to the board game Go: if you are too greedy, you will lose. |
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An internet rule about Hitler comparisons was planted on purpose |
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In 1990 a lawyer named Mike Godwin, frustrated by online arguments that ended with someone being called a Nazi, wrote a rule: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Then he started posting it on message boards. He called it a counter-meme, and has since described it as rhetorical and pedagogical. He wanted people who glibly compared someone to Hitler "to think a bit harder about the Holocaust." He seeded it through 1990 and 1991, and by 1991 it was spreading without him. I keep coming back to this one because we know exactly what its author wanted it to do. Godwin has mostly declined to police how people use it. He made a rare exception in August 2017, after self-identified neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, and said plainly that comparing them to Nazis was fine. |
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The Hans Island bottles are the one I'd take to dinner. |
