Some of Yap's stone money changes owners without moving

I have decided that this week's afternoons are out to get me, and I have no evidence.

Two dozen people were told they got lost in a mall

In 1995, Loftus and Pickrell told 24 people they had been lost in a shopping mall around the age of five. The event never happened, and a quarter of the participants came to remember it, partially or fully.

Every memory lecture I have sat through reaches this study eventually, and the replication authors note it is still cited in legal cases. Small samples invite argument, so in 2023 an Irish team led by Gillian Murphy repeated it with 123 participants and preregistered analysis plans. They coded 35 percent as reporting a false memory. A 2017 mega-analysis of eight published implantation studies, covering 423 participants, put the figure at 30.4 percent. In an extension of the replication, mock jurors were highly likely to believe the event had occurred and that the participant truly remembered it.

What irritates me is how rarely the retelling mentions the definitional fight. When Murphy's participants were asked directly, 14 percent said they had a memory of the fake event. Bernice Andrews and Chris Brewin split the story into six elements, and no participant remembered all six. Reanalysing the replication data, they wrote in Scientific American that only five participants could reasonably be claimed to have a false memory.

Golf's 18-hole round began with four short holes merged in 1764

In 1764 the first four holes of the Old Course at St Andrews were combined into two, which turned a round of 22 holes into a round of 18. Until then the course had 12 holes, ten of them played out and back and two played once.

Golf Digest's Alex Myers, citing Scottish Golf History, says the number was cut to 18 pretty arbitrarily when four short holes were combined. Snopes notes that early courses had anywhere from five to 24 holes. Myers adds that everyone was trying to copy the Old Course. Prestwick, for one, opened in 1851 with 12 holes and did not move to 18 until 1881.

The popular story involves a bottle of Scotch yielding 18 shots, and Snopes is unmoved: "The number of holes comprising a standard golf course was not determined by the amount of Scotch in a bottle."

Some of Yap's stone money changes owners without moving an inch

On the Pacific island of Yap, when a stone money disc changes owners, the disc stays where it is, according to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The museum gives the dimensions as 12 feet across, 1.5 feet thick and 8,800 pounds.

Dirk Van Tuerenhout, the museum's curator of anthropology, writes that the stones came from the islands of Palau, 280 miles southwest of Yap, and that a stone's value rose if someone was known to have died bringing it back. The Smithsonian, which holds a 168.5-pound ring from Yap, says some are so large and heavy that they cannot be moved at all, and that the community on Yap acknowledges changes in ownership.

I am an amateur here, but my own savings are a number in a building I have never seen, and I find the whole arrangement less exotic than I expected.

Typing distorted words to prove you were human also digitised newspapers

In 2008, the blurred words people typed to prove they were human were also being used to digitise newspapers. The system was reCAPTCHA, built at Carnegie Mellon University, and each challenge showed two words.

One was a control word with a known answer, and typing it correctly told the site you were human. The other had defeated optical character recognition, and your answer was recorded as a plausible guess. A 2008 paper in Science reported 99.1 percent word-level accuracy for the method, against 83.5 percent for standard OCR software. More than 40,000 websites were using it, and humans had deciphered over 440 million suspicious words in the first year. NPR reported that the New York Times was using it to digitise newspapers back to 1851.

Luis von Ahn, who led the work, told NPR that each of these challenges wastes about 10 seconds of a person's time, and estimated the daily total at roughly 500,000 hours.

Eight parallel music markets disagreed about which songs would sell

Salganik, Dodds and Watts ran a music website in eight parallel versions, and the versions disagreed about which songs would sell. Their 2006 paper in Science gave 14,341 participants, recruited mostly from a teen-interest site, the chance to download songs by unknown bands.

Some participants chose using band and song names alone. Others could also see how many times each song had been downloaded, and they were split into eight worlds that never saw each other's counts. All eight worlds with download counts showed more inequality between songs than the world without, and the inequality grew when songs were listed in order of popularity. I had assumed the internet's job was to find the best thing and hand it to me, so this was a small personal disappointment.

In the paper's words: "The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible."

If one of these comes up at dinner, make it the stone money of Yap.