|
I forgot to eat lunch yesterday and only noticed at four in the afternoon, when a student asked if I was allergic to food. |
|
My field spent a decade repeating a number nobody wrote down |
|
Somewhere in my own lecture slides sits a statistic I have been too embarrassed to delete: the average human now has a shorter attention span than a goldfish, eight seconds against nine. Neither I nor most people who repeat it invented it. It traces to a 2015 report commissioned by Microsoft Canada, which surveyed two thousand people and ran EEG tests on 112 of them to study how attention shifts across media. Buried on one page as background, not a finding, sat the eight-second figure, credited to a company called Statistic Brain. When a BBC reporter went looking in 2017 for where Statistic Brain got its numbers, he found nothing. The Associated Press could not locate the original study. A US National Library of Medicine researcher listed as a source said her name had never been attached to it. Attention researchers who study this for a living describe sustained focus as task-dependent, shaped by whatever task is in front of you. Microsoft's own research, the survey and the EEG work, quietly found something more interesting than decline, and only one of those two findings made it into a decade of headlines. Attention had reorganized: heavy digital multitaskers got faster at short bursts and worse at sustained focus. |
 |
|
A marathon's length was set by a seating chart |
|
A marathon is 26 miles and 385 yards long for a reason that has nothing to do with endurance. At the ancient games, the run to Athens was closer to 25 miles, and that rougher figure held through the first modern Olympics in 1896. It stayed loose until 1908, when London hosted the Games and the organizing committee needed the race to start somewhere specific and end somewhere specific: Windsor Castle at one end, the royal box at the Olympic stadium at the other, so the royal family would have a clear view of the finish. That routing produced the odd number almost by accident. Other cities kept running their own marathon distances for over a decade, until the International Amateur Athletic Federation adopted London's number as official in 1921, thirteen years later. It is the only Olympic record I know of that was set by a seating chart. |
 |
|
A country existed because two empires wanted the same mine |
|
For 103 years there was a country in Europe that existed only because Prussia and the Netherlands could not agree who owned a zinc deposit. Neutral Moresnet was carved out in 1816, a triangle of land roughly twice the size of Monaco, built around one mine called Vieille Montagne. It began with about 256 residents and fifty houses; by the time it ended, that had grown to roughly 4,500, and the mine's output was large enough that half the roofs of Paris were said to be covered in its zinc. In the early 1900s, a mine doctor named Wilhelm Molly proposed something stranger: turning the territory into the world's first Esperanto-speaking state, renamed Amikejo, place of friendship. The 1908 World Esperanto Congress recognized it as the movement's capital, and for a few years a corner of Belgium came closer to being founded on a made-up language than most countries ever get. The zinc ran out in 1885, and the Treaty of Versailles handed the land to Belgium in January 1920. |
 |
|
A frozen gas cylinder became the pan in your kitchen |
|
On April 6, 1938, a DuPont chemist named Roy Plunkett was researching refrigerant gases, nothing more. He had stored a batch of tetrafluoroethylene in pressurized cylinders on dry ice, and when he opened one to use it, no gas came out, though the cylinder weighed the same as before. He cut it open and found a slick white powder coating the inside instead. Plunkett tested the powder and found it heat resistant, inert, and almost impossible to stick anything to. DuPont had no cheap way to make more, so it sat shelved for years, until the Second World War, when the Manhattan Project needed something to line pipes and valve seals against a corrosive gas used in uranium enrichment. Only in the 1950s did the material reach ordinary kitchens, when an inventor named Marion Trozzolo coated a skillet with it, called it the Happy Pan, and began selling it commercially in 1961, twenty-three years after the cylinder that would not give up its gas. |
 |
|
Almost nobody online has ever posted anything |
|
Nine out of ten people on any online forum you have ever used have never once posted in it. A researcher named Will Hill noticed the pattern in the early 1990s at Bell Communications Research, studying behavior on early online systems. Decades later, the usability researcher Jakob Nielsen named it the 90-9-1 rule: roughly 90 percent of users only read, 9 percent contribute occasionally, and 1 percent account for most of what gets posted. What is strange is how consistent the shape stays. Early studies of Usenet, covering millions of messages, found the most active 3 percent of posters wrote a quarter of everything. On today's biggest platforms the imbalance often grows more extreme: blogs tend toward a 95-5-0.1 split, and one study of Wikipedia found roughly 0.2 percent of visitors did nearly all the editing. The 1 percent were doing this before anyone called it social media; the platforms mostly just gave the pattern a login screen. |
|
The Moresnet story is the one I would bring up first at dinner, mostly to watch someone try to picture a country founded on grammar. |
