Most of Palmerston Island shares a single surname

I have a rule against buying more notebooks, and it lasted until Tuesday.

1,011 brain scans found no evidence for left-brained or right-brained people

Every few months someone at a dinner tells me they are right-brained, and I nod in the way that costs me the least. In 2013, neuroscientists at the University of Utah went looking for people like that. They took resting scans from 1,011 people aged 7 to 29, divided each brain into about 7,000 regions, and asked whether anyone's connectivity leaned consistently to one side. They found no evidence that it did. Jeff Anderson, who led the study, said some functions do sit on one side of the brain, but "people don't tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided brain network."

Some asymmetries are real and striking. Michael Corballis, in a 2014 review in PLoS Biology, put left-hemisphere language at some 95 to 99 percent of right-handed people and about 70 percent of left-handed people. Anderson adds that attention leans right. The popular story grew from the split-brain work of the 1960s, which won Sperry a Nobel Prize in 1981 and, in Corballis's reading, inspired speculation that was mostly exaggerated or ill-founded. What irritates me is the leap from language sitting mostly on the left to a person sitting mostly on the left.

On creativity, Corballis cites imaging in which creative thought activates a widespread network, favouring neither hemisphere.

Bell Labs tested 16 keypad layouts, and the differences were small

A phone's keypad starts 1, 2, 3 across the top, and a calculator's starts 7, 8, 9. Mental Floss describes the calculator layout as a partial reverse of the phone's, and says it existed before Bell's. The phone version came out of tests that R. L. Deininger of Bell Labs reported in the Bell System Technical Journal in July 1960.

The first study compared 16 arrangements, tried in groups of three, each group by six employees over five sessions, and found only small differences in keying time and errors. A second study had 15 employees try five arrangements and found no significant differences in either measure. Its conclusion was that any of the five was acceptable, with one exception: two vertical columns, which many subjects disliked.

Whatever tipped the decision, a very small difference has been training our thumbs ever since.

Residents of Palmerston Island descend from one Englishman and three wives

Palmerston Island, in the Cook Islands, had a population of just 28 when RNZ reported on it in August 2025, and the vast majority of them share the surname Marsters. Over the Te Maeva Nui and Constitution Celebrations that July, 16 residents left, which put the island at 12 people.

The name goes back to William Marsters, an Englishman who settled there in the 1860s with three Polynesian wives. He divided the land among them, and those holdings are still the island's three family branches.

Supplies arrive by inter-island ship, usually every three months, so households order in bulk to last that long, which also covers shipping delays. The island's school has 12 registered students, and older students go to Rarotonga to finish school. There is no shop, and when the cargo arrives, the administration team and the community unload it and deliver it to homes.

Charles Kao predicted pure glass could carry light for kilometres

In 1966, Charles Kao and George Hockham published a paper in the Proceedings of the IEE arguing that optical fibre could carry the equivalent of 200 television channels. It predicted a loss of 20 decibels per kilometre. The fibres available in the 1960s managed only about 20 metres, according to the Nobel Prize's account of the work. Kao, who worked at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England, showed that most of the signal loss came from impurities in the glass.

The idea met scepticism. The IEEE historian Robert Colburn, who interviewed Kao in 2004, said: "No one in their right mind thought you could send a signal through glass." The objection, as IEEE Spectrum recorded it, was that you cannot see through a foot of glass turned on its side, much less one a thousand kilometres long.

Four years after the paper, Corning in New York state was producing such fibres. Kao shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, 43 years after the paper.

Talking to a webcam can mean talking to everyone at once

Michael Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, spent 18 months with 15 undergraduate research assistants studying people who talk to webcams. His team watched more than 20,000 videos and examined over 500 personal vlogs addressed to no one in particular. Recording one, Wesch wrote in 2009, means addressing potentially "everyone who has or will have access to the Internet," your own future self included. Would-be vloggers often spent several hours transfixed in front of the lens, trying to decide what to say.

The title of his paper calls this context collapse. In 2011, Alice Marwick and danah boyd took the idea to Twitter, describing how social media collapse multiple audiences into single contexts. Their interviewees coped by imagining an audience, one evoked through their own tweets.

I write this newsletter to an imagined audience, and I would like it recorded that you are all very polite.

The Palmerston supply ship is the one I would retell at dinner.