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Somewhere in my house there is a drawer of charging cables, and none of them fits anything I currently own. |
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The original Mozart effect lasted ten to fifteen minutes |
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The original Mozart effect lasted ten to fifteen minutes, and the researcher who found it said so herself. In 1993 the psychologist Frances Rauscher played 36 college students ten minutes of a Mozart sonata before a spatial reasoning test, and the Mozart group beat students who had heard silence or a relaxing voice. The result ran as a one-page paper in Nature. Rauscher described it as a small gain that does not last very long, and she found no effect on general intelligence. By 1998 the finding had become policy. Georgia's governor, Zell Miller, put $105,000 in a $12.5 billion budget proposal so that the parents of every newborn in the state could be given classical music, which he said would boost the infant's intelligence later in life. The piece he specifically proposed including was Beethoven's Ode to Joy. The field then did the slow work. A 2010 meta-analysis by Pietschnig and colleagues pooled nearly 40 studies and over 3,000 subjects. It found a small average effect, but other music produced a similar one, studies by Rauscher and colleagues reported noticeably larger effects than studies by other researchers, and formal tests found publication bias. The authors concluded that little evidence is left for a specific, performance-enhancing Mozart effect. I know this pattern from my own field: the one-page result travels, and the correction stays in the journal. Ten minutes of music before a test is still pleasant, which seems a perfectly good reason to do it. |
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Container ships began as a tanker with 58 boxes on deck |
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On 26 April 1956 a converted oil tanker called the Ideal X left Newark for Houston with 58 containers, crane-loaded onto a special deck built above its tanks. It is described as the first modern containership, and its owner, Malcolm McLean, ran a trucking company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The sums were the point. USC Sea Grant puts ocean cargo at more than five dollars a ton the old way in 1956 and less than twenty cents in a container. The boxes themselves came in different sizes from today's. Accounts of those first containers give their length as 33 or 35 feet, and the later international standard, agreed after American and European negotiations, fixed the width at 8 feet and the height at 8 or 8 and a half feet while allowing lengths of 10, 20, 30 and 40. Worldwide, the 20- and 40-foot lengths predominate, according to the Container Handbook. |
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Singapore is about a quarter bigger than in 1960 |
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Singapore measured 581.5 square kilometres in 1960 and 725.7 in 2019, which makes it about a quarter bigger without annexing anyone. That is 144.2 square kilometres of new land. The extra land was reclaimed from the sea, and reclaiming takes sand. For years the sand came from abroad. Before Indonesia announced an export ban in 2007, 90 per cent of the country's sand came from Indonesia. Malaysia followed with a ban in 2018, and Cambodia has since banned all sand exports to Singapore. At Pulau Tekong the government is using a method called empoldering, which Singapore's own civics site says is expected to save 40 per cent of the sand volume and construction cost. The target on that same site is 766 square kilometres by 2030, which would make the country about 32 per cent larger than it was in 1960. |
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Gorilla Glass grew from a 1960s glass meant for phone booths |
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In the 1960s, Corning developed Chemcor, a chemically strengthened glass intended for phone booths, prison windows, eyeglasses and automobile windshields. It was strengthened by ion exchange, in which smaller ions in the glass are replaced with larger ions from a chemical bath. Corning describes this as an alternative to thermal tempering, which is still how most glass is strengthened today. Chemcor had mixed fortunes. Physics World reports that it was used until the early 1990s in applications including car windscreens, planes and drug vials, while Corning says it did not ultimately reach its intended applications as a fully commercialized product line. Then, in 2005, Corning executives realised that mobile electronics would soon need a strong, durable glass. Chemcor itself was wrong for mobile electronics, and its history of chemical strengthening gave the company's scientists an entry point. Corning says the first generation of Gorilla Glass was released on first generation smartphones just two years later. |
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More than a third of 2013's webpages were gone by 2023 |
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Pew Research Center took a random sample of just under a million pages from the Common Crawl archive, spread across 2013 to 2023, and checked whether each one was still accessible. Of the pages collected in 2013, 38 per cent were not. Across the whole decade, a quarter of all the pages that existed at some point had vanished. Pew also followed nearly five million tweets posted in spring 2023, and 18 per cent were no longer publicly visible by mid-June. The decay shows up in places that are supposed to last. Pew found that 23 per cent of news pages contained at least one broken link, and 21 per cent of government pages did. On Wikipedia, 54 per cent of pages had at least one link in their references pointing to a page that no longer exists. I checked every source for this issue today, which is the only day I can vouch for them. |
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The Mozart one is the dinner-table story, mostly for the Beethoven. |
