Most of Whittier, Alaska lives in one building

My sister asked what I do all day and I said reading, which she received the way you receive news of a minor crime.

A short delay makes your own touch more ticklish

In the classic version of this experiment, a volunteer moves one hand and a robot strokes the other palm to match, and the volunteer rates how ticklish it feels. Add a delay of up to 200 milliseconds between movement and touch and the ratings climb. Rotating the direction of the touch relative to the movement, by up to 90 degrees, does the same.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Daniel Wolpert and Chris Frith reported in Nature Neuroscience in 1998 that a self-produced touch is perceived as less ticklish than the same touch produced by someone else. Their scans pointed to the cerebellum, which is thought to predict what your own movement will feel like and turn down the touch areas of the cortex in advance. A delay or a twist makes the prediction fit worse, and the touch is rated as more ticklish.

What irritates me is how often this is told as a party trick about tickling. The scan study used six volunteers, which is a thin base for a textbook fact, and I would not rest anything on it alone. A 2024 meta-analysis of imaging studies in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review pooled the evidence on sensory attenuation, the reduced intensity of self-generated stimuli, and proposes a cerebellum-centred network that predicts the consequences of your own actions.

Concert pitch became 440 hertz at a 1939 conference

In the late 1800s, the Old Philharmonic Pitch put A at about 453 hertz, which Britannica says strained singers' voices and made wind instruments quickly out of date. The A that tuners use today, 440 hertz, was settled at an international conference in London in 1939, after what the publisher's blurb for historian Fanny Gribenski's book Tuning the World calls decades of negotiations between countries.

In between, an international commission in Paris adopted a compromise of 435 hertz in 1858 to 1859, and England adopted 439 in 1896, according to Britannica. Gribenski's book argues that the final outcome was ultimately determined by the influence of a few powerful nations.

The standards body ISO still publishes the result as ISO 16, which says the frequency for the note A in the treble stave shall be 440 hertz, and a review in 2022 confirmed it.

Most of Whittier lives in one building

Begich Towers in Whittier, Alaska, has 14 storeys, 196 apartments and most of the town living in it. Snopes checked the figures with the city and found that about 80 to 90 per cent of Whittier's roughly 300 residents live there, with the rest in a separate condo building.

The Army Corps of Engineers built it in 1943 as the Hodge Building to house military personnel, and it has run as a condominium association since 1974.

The road connection runs through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, a World War II railroad tunnel that opened to vehicles on 7 June 2000. It is 13,300 feet long with a single lane over the track, so cars and trains take turns and highway traffic changes direction through the day. Alaska's Department of Transportation meters traffic at one car or pickup every 2.5 seconds, one commercial truck or RV every 15 seconds and one bus every 45 seconds.

Red and green LEDs waited three decades for a blue one

Red and green diodes had been around for a long time, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences notes that white LED lamps could not be created without blue light, and the blue LED resisted development for about three decades. Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light in the early 1990s and shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for efficient blue LEDs.

The academy's own poster compares luminous efficacy, the light produced per watt: 16 lumens for the 19th-century light bulb, 70 for the 20th-century fluorescent lamp and 300 for the LED. It rates their lifetimes at 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 hours. About one fourth of global electricity consumption goes on lighting.

The academy's summary line is that incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century and the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps.

Scammers keep saying Nigeria, and a Microsoft researcher saw why

Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research asked in 2012 why Nigerian scam emails keep mentioning Nigeria, even though a less outlandish story would collect more replies. His answer was that the absurdity does a job: a story most readers dismiss on sight leaves the scammer talking only to the few who do not.

Every reply costs the scammer time and effort, so the replies that matter are the ones most likely to end in a payment. Herley frames the choice of whom to target as a classification problem, in which a false positive is a target who is attacked but yields nothing. He wrote, according to The Register and Popular Science, "A less outlandish wording that did not mention Nigeria would almost certainly gather more total responses." The Register's summary is that such a wording would also yield lower overall profit.

My delete key, it seems, has been part of their quality control.

The Whittier building is the one I would retell at dinner.