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I spent forty minutes this week trying to remember the word for the plastic tip on a shoelace before giving up and looking it up like a coward. |
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Extreme old age keeps turning out to be a filing error |
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Sogen Kato was, according to his family, Tokyo's oldest living man, 111 years old and too frail to see visitors. When officials finally forced their way into his room in 2010 to honour him for Respect for the Aged Day, they found a mummified body that had been dead since around 1978, for roughly 32 years. His daughter and granddaughter had spent that time collecting close to 9.5 million yen of his pension. Kato's case triggered a nationwide check, and Japan discovered it could not confirm that 234,354 other listed centenarians were even alive. A UCL demographer, Saul Newman, later found the same shape worldwide: Costa Rica's own census audit showed 42 percent of people claiming to be 99 or older had misstated their age, and a Greek audit found at least 72 percent of registered centenarians did not exist. Supercentenarian birthdates also cluster suspiciously on days divisible by five, the kind of pattern a bureaucrat produces when rounding an unknown age rather than recording an exact one. The regions marketed for having unusually many people past 110, from Sardinia to Okinawa to Costa Rica's Nicoya peninsula, are also the regions where a missing birth certificate was, for most of the twentieth century, unremarkable. Newman won the first Ig Nobel Prize ever awarded in demography for the finding in 2024, an award reserved for research that makes you laugh, then makes you think. |
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A grocer hired actors to make shopping carts look normal |
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By the store entrance at Humpty Dumpty in Oklahoma City, in the summer of 1937, sat a row of brand-new folding shopping carts that nobody would touch. Sylvan Goldman, the store's owner, had spent months building it: a folding metal frame with two wire baskets meant to carry more than a shopper's arms could. Customers wanted no part of it. Men saw a basket on wheels as proof they couldn't carry their own shopping; women, he said, thought of baby carriages and stayed away. His fix was to hire young men and women to push the carts around his store all day, filling them with groceries they never bought. Ordinary shoppers, watching strangers use the carts without embarrassment, began copying them, and within weeks every cart was in use. By 1940, rival grocers faced a seven-year wait for carts of their own. Roughly twenty million now roll through American stores, about one for every thirteen people who once refused to push one. |
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Two neighbouring islands sit a day apart in time |
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Two islands in the Bering Strait are twenty-one hours apart in time, even though you can see one from the other. Little Diomede and Big Diomede sit two and a half miles apart, one Alaskan, one Russian. The International Date Line runs through the strait between them, so someone on Little Diomede looking across the water in winter is looking at a place already living through tomorrow. Locals call them Yesterday Isle and Tomorrow Island. Until 1948, Inupiat families crossed freely between the islands, until the Soviet Union turned Big Diomede into a military outpost and sealed the border. In 1965, an American named Dennis Schmitt walked across on the winter ice anyway. In August 1987, the swimmer Lynne Cox swam the 2.7-mile route through near-freezing water in just over two hours, with Soviet permission arranged months ahead. Four months later, at the signing of a nuclear arms treaty in Washington, Mikhail Gorbachev toasted her by name: "She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live." |
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A Cambridge coffee pot got its own live camera feed |
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In 1991, two computer scientists at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory got tired of climbing three flights of stairs to find the shared coffee pot in the Trojan Room empty. Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky pointed an old camera at the machine, wired it to a video capture card, and wrote software so anyone on the lab's network could check the pot first. The image was grainy, 128 by 128 pixels, refreshed a few times a minute. In November 1993, once web browsers could display images, two other researchers put the feed online, and the whole internet could check on a coffee pot in a building it would never visit. It ran for a decade before Cambridge's lab moved buildings and switched the camera off live, at 09:54 UTC on 22 August 2001, front-page news in The Times and The Washington Post. The pot itself outlasted the joke, selling at a charity auction for 3,350 pounds and moving to a computer museum in Paderborn, Germany, in 2016, empty and off camera. |
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A forum comment about creationism became an internet law |
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The winking smiley has exactly one job on the internet: telling you the sentence before it was a joke. In August 2005, on a Christian forum, a user was mocking creationism so effectively that another poster warned he needed a winking emoticon or people would think he meant it. A member named Nathan Poe replied with the observation that now carries his name: without a wink or some other unmistakable signal, it is impossible to parody an extreme position that somebody, somewhere, won't mistake for the real thing. Poe's Law outlived that argument about creationism because the mechanism has nothing to do with creationism specifically. It applies anywhere a belief can be held with total sincerity, from conspiracy theories to political extremism to wellness grifts, because there is always a real version just as extreme as your joke. By 2017, Wired called it one of the internet's most important ideas. It's still why a committed troll and a true believer can post the same sentence and mean opposite things. |
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Tell someone about the Cambridge coffee pot tonight, the one I can't stop bringing up uninvited. |
