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I reorganised my bookshelf by colour this week and can now find nothing, which my field would politely call a retrieval problem.
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Your memories quietly accept edits from other people
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Your memory of an event can absorb details you only heard about later, and you will not notice the join. My field calls the best-studied version of this the misinformation effect, and the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus spent some thirty years mapping it.
The basic finding is simple and unsettling. People who see something and are later fed misleading details about it often go on to remember those details as part of what they saw. A 2005 review of the field in Learning & Memory goes further: misinformation can lead people to believe they experienced rich, complex events that never happened. Across many studies that tried to plant a childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall, about 30 percent of people produced a partial or complete false memory of it.
My favourite version involves a fake advertisement for a Disney resort that featured Bugs Bunny. After seeing it, 16 percent of people in one study later said they had met him there, which is impossible, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character.
The finding that gets reported least is the one I find most useful. Warning people in advance that they might be misled does sometimes protect them, but according to the review, only under limited circumstances.
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Fortune cookies were being baked in Japan by 1878
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Biscuits shaped like fortune cookies were being made by hand near a temple in Kyoto as early as 1878, decades before anyone served one in an American restaurant. The evidence was dug up by a Japanese researcher, Yasuko Nakamachi, who traced references in Japanese literature and art from well before the 1900s.
The cookie reached the United States through Japanese-owned restaurants in California, which introduced the dessert between 1907 and 1914.
The move to Chinese restaurants came later. After the Second World War, soldiers returning from the Pacific asked for fortune cookies at Chinese American restaurants, and that is where the cookie settled for good. When the research came out in 2008, The New York Times ran it under the headline Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie.
Near Kyoto's shrines, a few places still make them the traditional way.
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Almost an entire Alaskan town lives in one building
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Whittier, Alaska, tucked between mountains on the west side of Prince William Sound, has a little over 200 residents, and almost all of them live in the same 14-storey building. Begich Towers looks like an ageing hotel and started life as an Army barracks during the Cold War.
It still works like a small town stacked vertically. Inside are the post office, the police station, a laundromat, a market, a convenience store, a health clinic and a church in the basement, and one resident runs a bed and breakfast on the top two floors. Your neighbour, your doctor and your postmaster are all a lift ride away.
Getting there is its own project. You can arrive by sea, and the only way in by land is a long, one-way, one-lane tunnel through the mountains. At night the tunnel closes completely.
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The QR code was invented to keep track of car parts
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In 1994 Masahiro Hara, an engineer at the Japanese automotive company Denso, designed the QR code to speed up the tracking of car parts. Two of its key ideas came from places that have nothing to do with factories.
The first was the board game Go. A stone placed slightly off an intersection is still easy to read, and Hara borrowed that tolerance: the code repeats its information, so damaged sections can be made up for by the rest.
The second came on a train. Looking out of the window, Hara noticed a tall building standing out from everything around it, and realised the code needed a symbol that would stand out in the same way from nearby text, so a scanner would never confuse the two. After analysing the black and white patterns in newspaper images, his team settled on a ratio of 1:1:3:1:1 for the corner boxes, which is why those three squares look the way they do.
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Most people online never post anything at all
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In 2006 the usability researcher Jakob Nielsen put a number on something everyone online half suspected. In most online communities, he wrote, 90 percent of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9 percent contribute a little, and 1 percent account for almost all the action.
He called it participation inequality, building on work by Will Hill at Bell Communications Research in the early 1990s. Some places were far more lopsided. Nielsen estimated that Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people, about 0.003 percent of its users, made roughly two-thirds of its edits.
I could not stop thinking about what that does to the comments under anything you read. They come from a small, unusually talkative minority, while the quiet majority reading alongside you leaves no trace at all.
If you have never left a comment anywhere, you are in excellent and very numerous company.
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The Bugs Bunny one is going to bother me all week.
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