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I spent last night failing to explain to my neighbour what a neuron does, and I suspect the neighbour now understands it better than I do.
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Teaching to your learning style has almost no evidence behind it
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The idea that you learn best when lessons match your learning style, visual, auditory or kinaesthetic, has almost no good evidence behind it. I get asked about it more than almost anything else, usually by someone who was sorted into a category at school and has quietly believed it ever since.
In 2008 a review led by the psychologist Harold Pashler went looking for that evidence. The test is specific. If learning styles matter, visual learners taught with pictures should beat visual learners taught with words, and verbal learners should show the opposite pattern. Very few studies had even been designed to check that. The ones that had found virtually no sign of it, and the review, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, concluded there was no adequate evidence base for using learning-styles assessments in schools.
Preferences are real. Plenty of people would rather look at a diagram than listen to a lecture, and that preference is easy to measure, which is part of why the idea spread so well. What a preference fails to predict is who actually learns more from which format. The review's own recommendation was to spend the time and money on teaching methods with stronger evidence behind them.
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Bubble Wrap was supposed to go on your walls
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In 1957 Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes ran two layers of plastic shower curtain through a heat-sealing machine. They were trying to make textured wallpaper for the Beat generation. What came out was a sheet of film full of trapped air bubbles, and as wallpaper it went nowhere.
They kept the bubbles anyway. The pair brainstormed more than four hundred possible uses, and one of them, greenhouse insulation, made it as far as real greenhouses before it proved useless there too.
The rescue came from IBM. The company had recently introduced the 1401, a machine often called the Model T of the computer industry, and it needed a way to protect the delicate thing in transit. Fielding and Chavannes had founded Sealed Air in 1960, and from 1961 their failed wallpaper was keeping computers in one piece. IBM's business opened the door for a lot of other companies to start using it.
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A Welsh village stretched its name to attract tourists by train
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In the 1860s a village on Anglesey, an island off mainland Wales, made its name much longer to bring in visitors. It had been Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, which was already plenty, but a local resident pushed for something long enough to give the village's railway station the longest name in Britain.
The result was the name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which runs to 58 characters. Roughly translated, it means St Mary's Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St Tysilio near the red cave. It reads less like a name than a set of walking directions, which I find oddly charming for a marketing exercise.
About 3,000 people live there, and most of them very sensibly call it Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG. For all that effort, the village still loses to Bangkok, whose ceremonial name runs to 168 characters.
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Fast Wi-Fi came out of a hunt for exploding black holes
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Fast Wi-Fi owes a debt to a group of Australian astronomers who spent the 1970s hunting for exploding black holes. The team, led by John O'Sullivan at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, was listening for radio signals from tiny ones, objects smaller than atoms. Any signal would be faint, so they put fast Fourier transforms to work, a mathematical method for picking a meaningful pattern out of a jumbled one.
Two decades later the same team had a more domestic problem. Radio sent around a room bounces off walls and furniture, interferes with itself and arrives at the receiver as a smeary mess. The astronomy maths turned out to be very good at unsmearing it. In 1996 the US Patent and Trademark Office granted CSIRO a patent, and the agency's approach went on to form the basis of fast Wi-Fi.
The black holes, for the record, never turned up.
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The internet's rule about Hitler comparisons was planted on purpose
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Around 1990, Mike Godwin was tired of watching online arguments slide into comparisons with Hitler. Lecturing people had no effect at all, so he built a rule designed to spread.
It sounded like a law of physics: as an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches one. Then he seeded it across message boards on purpose, as what he called a counter-meme, something catchy enough to compete with the bad habit it described. By 1991 it had spread well beyond his own efforts to push it.
What I could not stop thinking about is that one of the internet's famous rules was planted on purpose, as a nudge. Godwin has described the law as rhetorical and pedagogical, closer to a teaching tool than a finding. He has said he wanted people to be aware of the gravity of the comparisons they were making.
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If you only retell one of these tonight, make it the wallpaper.
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