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I spent forty minutes this morning arguing with a parking app about whether I am, biologically, capable of parallel parking, and I lost. |
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Lumosity paid two million dollars for what its games can't do |
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A company called Lumosity spent years selling puzzles as protection for your brain, and in January 2016 the Federal Trade Commission made it pay two million dollars for saying so without proof. I bring this up every time someone asks whether they should play the games. Here is what the training literature actually supports. Get someone to practice a task on a screen for weeks and they get better at that task. That part is real and well replicated. What almost never survives contact with a proper study is the leap everyone wants to make next: that getting better at the game makes you sharper at anything else, driving, remembering names, doing your taxes. A 2019 second-order meta-analysis pooling ten separate meta-analyses of training studies, published in Collabra: Psychology, found the far-transfer effect landed at zero once corrected for publication bias and measured against people doing a real alternative activity instead of nothing at all. In 2014, roughly seventy cognitive scientists and neuroscientists signed a public statement, organized through the Stanford Center on Longevity, warning that the industry's claims about neural function and everyday performance had outrun the evidence. My own field wrote that statement, and the industry kept selling anyway. What irritates me is watching the narrow, real finding travel as the broad, false one by the time it reaches a reader. |
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A royal viewing box added 385 yards to every marathon |
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At the 1908 London Olympics, organizers moved the marathon's finish line to sit in front of the royal box so the royal family could watch in comfort, and the resulting route measured out to 26 miles and 385 yards. I am not a sports historian, but three separate accounts of that day agree on the number. The distance had been expected to land closer to 25 miles, roughly what the first modern Games had used. Nobody planned to keep the odd extra length. For over a decade, Olympic marathons were still run at older, rounder distances, and 1908's number was just one variant among several, until 1921, when the International Amateur Athletic Federation adopted it as the permanent standard, for reasons that had nothing to do with physiology or fairness, only precedent. Every marathoner who has hated the final 385 yards is, technically, blaming a royal seating plan from 1908. |
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Alaska can see tomorrow from an island four kilometers away |
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From the shore of one island in the Bering Strait you can look across less than four kilometers of water and see tomorrow. Big Diomede belongs to Russia. Little Diomede, home to about eighty people, belongs to Alaska. The two sit closer together than many cities sit to their own airports, but they fall on opposite sides of the International Date Line, and Russia keeps its side on a single zone that never observes daylight saving. The gap between them runs twenty-one hours in winter and twenty in summer, between two points a strong kayaker could cross in an afternoon. Locals call them Yesterday Island and Tomorrow Island. On August 7, 1987, the long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox actually made that crossing, through water just above freezing. Four months later, Mikhail Gorbachev stood beside Ronald Reagan at the signing of the INF Treaty and mentioned her by name, saying she had shown, in two hours, how close their two countries really stood. |
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Civilian GPS used to be deliberately made less accurate |
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Civilian GPS used to be deliberately broken. From the system's early days until May 2000, the U.S. military scrambled the public signal on purpose, a policy called Selective Availability, so anyone without military clearance got a position accurate to only about a hundred meters, enough to place you on the wrong block. Ships, hikers, and the first generation of car navigation units all lived with that fuzziness as a fact of life. At midnight on May 2, 2000, President Bill Clinton's order to switch the scrambling off took effect, and accuracy improved roughly tenfold overnight, down to about ten meters for anyone with a basic receiver. The White House's announcement framed the change as a gift to boaters and hikers. What it did was make location data precise enough to build a product category on. Turn-by-turn directions and the ride-hailing app that finds you on a specific corner both run on an accuracy threshold a president switched on at midnight, twenty-six years ago. |
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Repeating a claim makes it feel true, even when it's false |
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I have read the same fake fact three times this week, from three different people, and each time it felt a little more true, which is exactly what it is supposed to do. Psychologists call it the illusory truth effect: say something twice and it starts to feel more believable than a claim you are hearing for the first time, whether or not it is actually correct. The effect has been studied since 1977, but a meta-analysis published this year in Nature Communications pooled 182 studies and more than 31,000 participants and finally put a number on it, a small, statistically solid bump in believability from repetition alone. What unsettles me is who it works on. Knowing the correct answer does not reliably protect you, and being told the source is unreliable barely dents it. I do not have a fix for this beyond noticing it, and noticing it has not made me any faster at catching it while it is happening. |
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The Diomede story is the one I'd tell at a dinner party, mostly to watch someone try to picture time working like that. |
