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I explained the wrong mechanism for jet lag to a stranger on a plane last week, confidently, and then landed already regretting it. |
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Comparing brothers solved why IQ scores started falling |
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My field has one chart it likes to show off first: IQ scores climbing by about three points a decade across dozens of countries for most of the twentieth century, a trend so reliable that psychologists gave it a name, the Flynn effect, and treated it almost like a law of nature. Then, sometime in the 1990s, the line in several countries quietly stopped climbing and started to fall. The clearest evidence comes from Norway, where every young man has taken a standardized IQ test at military conscription since the 1950s. Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg pulled the records of more than 700,000 conscripts and found scores rising through the cohort born in 1975, then dropping steadily in every cohort after it, by roughly seven points a generation. Because Norway drafts brothers from the same families years apart, the two researchers could compare siblings directly. The decline showed up just as clearly within families as across the general population, which is the kind of pattern you get from a shared environment rather than a shared gene pool. A separate review of test data across Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia found the same downward bend, arriving at slightly different times in each country. My field does not agree yet on which single piece, schooling, screen time, sleep, or diet, explains most of it. The chart my professors handed me as proof of a permanently smarter species had already turned over while they were still drawing it. |
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The wallpaper that failed twice before it wrapped IBM's computer |
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In 1957, an engineer named Alfred Fielding and a chemist named Marc Chavannes ran two plastic shower curtains through a heat-sealing machine, trying to bond them into a textured wallpaper for a design trend they were betting on. The machine sealed air inside instead, leaving the two men holding a sheet of plastic full of bubbles that nobody wanted on a wall. They tried selling it as greenhouse insulation next. It failed that test too, trapping too much heat for the plants underneath. For four years the product had a patent and a company but no customer, until IBM needed to ship its new 1401 computer in 1961 without shredding it in transit. The bubbles that failed as wallpaper and failed as greenhouse insulation were exactly what a mainframe needed on a truck. Sealed Air, the company Fielding and Chavannes built around one rejected wallpaper idea, made $4.5 billion in 2017 selling the byproduct nobody originally wanted. |
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A town too proud to be called a village stayed Spanish |
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Spain has owned a town surrounded by France for more than three and a half centuries, because of a technicality nobody closed. The Treaty of the Pyrenees handed France thirty-three villages in the valley of Cerdanya in 1659, but Llívia was not a village under Catalan law. It had been the region's capital since Roman times and legally counted as a town, so the treaty's wording never touched it. Spain kept Llívia. France kept everything around it. The result is a Spanish town sitting entirely inside French territory, connected to the rest of Spain by a road that Madrid still counts as part of its own national highway, even though most of it runs through France. That arrangement got tested in the 1970s, when French officials installed ordinary road signs along the route. Spain treated it as a challenge to the old technicality and objected so forcefully that the argument still has a name: the War of the Stops. |
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GPS satellites are built to run slow before they launch |
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Every GPS satellite carries an atomic clock, and every one is deliberately mistuned before it reaches orbit. General relativity says a clock sitting in weaker gravity ticks faster than one on the ground, and at GPS altitude that effect alone adds about forty-five microseconds to a satellite's day. Special relativity works the other way: a clock moving as fast as a GPS satellite loses about seven microseconds a day compared with a stationary one. Combined, an unadjusted GPS clock would run about thirty-eight microseconds fast every day, enough error to throw a position off by miles within hours. Engineers correct this before launch rather than after. They slow the satellite's oscillator by a fixed, precomputed amount on the ground, so relativity speeds it back up to the correct rate once the satellite reaches orbit. That correction has been running quietly inside every phone map since the first GPS satellites went up in the 1970s. |
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Most of the internet never types a word into it |
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Most of the people inside any online community will never type a single word into it, and a researcher named Jakob Nielsen proved it in 2006 by counting a Usenet archive nobody else wanted to touch. His numbers held up disturbingly well: ninety percent of users read and never post, nine percent chip in occasionally, and one percent produce almost everything anyone else reads. In that archive of two million messages, 27 percent of posters showed up exactly once. On Wikipedia at the time, roughly one visitor in five hundred had ever made an edit. Some platforms skew even harder than that. Nielsen found blog comment sections running closer to ninety-five to five to a tenth of one percent, and Wikipedia itself even more lopsided than his general estimate, with a sliver of contributors responsible for nearly everything else. You are, statistically, one of the ninety. I am writing this sentence, which makes me the one, and I promise it is less glamorous than it sounds. |
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The Llívia one is the one I'd bring up if someone showed me a map and dared me. |
