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I spent forty minutes yesterday arguing with a vending machine about whether it was broken or slow, and for the record, I lost. |
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My field spent years confusing confidence with accuracy |
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Every neuroscience course still teaches the flashbulb memory idea, the claim that shocking news burns itself into memory with unusual precision, like a photograph rather than an ordinary memory. The field has tested that claim across two decades of studies on the September 11 attacks, and a 2016 review by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps in Current Directions in Psychological Science lays out what actually happens instead. The clearest version came from a Duke University study published the same year as the attacks: researchers asked 54 students to record how they learned the news, alongside an ordinary recent memory, then retested them weeks later. A separate ten-year tracking project followed 202 people across seven American cities, resurveying them one week, eleven months, thirty-five months, and ten years after the event. Across both, the pattern repeats: the consistency of people's September 11 memories decays at essentially the same rate as their consistency for mundane events, forgetting and reshuffling details the same way. What does not decay is confidence. People stay just as sure their vivid memories are accurate even as the details drift, while confidence in the ordinary memories falls right alongside the forgetting. I still catch myself trusting my most vivid memories the most, which the review says is exactly the group to trust least. |
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A 1786 letter set the shape of your printer paper |
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Fold a sheet of A4 paper in half and the smaller rectangle keeps the same proportions as the original. Fold it again, and the same holds, indefinitely. The property comes from a letter the German scholar Georg Christoph Lichtenberg sent a colleague, Johann Beckmann, on October 25, 1786, describing a rectangle whose sides sit in the ratio of the square root of two to one, the one ratio that survives being cut in half forever. The letter sat as a curiosity for over a century. In 1922, engineer Walter Porstmann built it into a paper-sizing system for Germany, DIN 476, with a base sheet, A0, of exactly one square metre; halve it for A1, halve that for A2, down to the A4 in your printer tray. The system became international standard ISO 216 in 1975. Nearly every country uses it now; the United States and Canada, still on a separate standard called ANSI Letter, are the exceptions. I have never forgiven Porstmann for making my margins this easy to guess. |
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The internet's fake island has a real weather buoy |
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In the Gulf of Guinea, at the exact point where the equator crosses the prime meridian, a solar-powered buoy has been riding the open ocean since 1997. It measures air and water temperature, wind speed, and barometric pressure for a tropical weather-monitoring network called PIRATA, run jointly by the United States, France, and Brazil. Its official designation is Station 13010. Everyone who works with it calls it Soul. The location got a second, much stranger identity in 2011, when the public domain map dataset Natural Earth added a label there: Null Island. Geocoding software has always defaulted broken or blank location data to zero degrees north, zero degrees east, since that is what an empty coordinate field resolves to, and cartographers needed a quick way to flag the pileup. The joke caught on faster than the buoy's own name ever did. Station 13010 has sat exactly there, measuring something real, for going on three decades now. |
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A president's order made every GPS ten times sharper overnight |
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For its first two decades in civilian hands, GPS was engineered to be slightly wrong on purpose. The satellites broadcast a deliberately degraded timing signal called Selective Availability, a national-security safeguard meant to keep hostile forces from using American satellites for precision targeting, and it capped ordinary civilian accuracy at around 100 metres, enough to put you on the wrong side of a city block. Just after midnight Eastern time on May 1, 2000, President Bill Clinton ordered Selective Availability switched off across the entire satellite constellation at once. Civilian accuracy improved to somewhere between 10 and 20 metres overnight, roughly a tenfold jump, with no new hardware involved and no announcement most people ever noticed. The Department of Defense has said so twice now that it is not coming back: once in 2000, and again when it left Selective Availability out of the GPS III satellites entirely. |
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A creationism argument produced Poe's Law in 2005 |
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In August 2005, a poster using the name Nathan Poe waded into a Christian Forums thread called Big Contradictions in the evolution theory. Another user had just explained that you have to mark sarcasm with a winking smiley or people will take it seriously. Poe replied with an observation that outlived the argument that produced it: without a winking smiley or some other obvious sign of humour, it is impossible to write a parody of a creationist extreme enough that somebody, somewhere, will not mistake it for a genuine post. The internet had been rediscovering this problem in different words for years; Poe's version is the one that stuck. It now has a name, and it shows up anywhere satire and sincerity share a platform: political forums, product reviews, conspiracy communities, comment sections generally. By 2012, a philosophy journal was treating Poe's Law seriously enough to worry that citing it too often just deepens the disagreements it is meant to defuse. |
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The Null Island story is the one I'd retell at dinner. |
