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It rained sideways this morning, which I have decided to take personally.
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Your eyes can change what you hear, though not for everyone
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Watch a video of someone mouthing ga while the soundtrack has them saying ba, and there is a good chance you will hear a third sound that nobody said: da. This is the McGurk effect, first reported by McGurk and MacDonald in Nature in 1976 under the title Hearing lips and seeing voices.
It is one of my favourite demonstrations, partly because knowing about it does not help. Even once you understand the trick, you keep hearing da while you watch, and the real ba comes back as soon as you close your eyes.
For decades my field treated it as the textbook proof that the brain fuses sight and sound into one experience. The picture is now messier. A 2019 review by Lawrence Rosenblum of the University of California, Riverside points to strong evidence for individual differences, with some people showing little visual influence at all, and one study he cites found the effect on only about half of the trials. Rosenblum argues there is now good reason to believe the McGurk effect is not a valid test of multisensory integration.
The everyday version is far less dramatic and far more common, and it does not need a lab. As Rosenblum puts it, everyone lip-reads.
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Kleenex was first sold as a make-up remover
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In 1924 Kimberly-Clark launched Kleenex as a disposable remover for make-up and cold cream. The material inside it was older than the product. During the First World War, when cotton was scarce, the company sold a wood-pulp wadding called Cellucotton to the US military as surgical dressing, and Red Cross nurses also used it as makeshift sanitary pads. Kimberly-Clark even experimented with a thin, flattened version as a possible gas mask filter.
After the war the company bought back the military's surplus and needed a use for it. The name was built from clean, plus the K and ex of Kotex.
Then customers started writing in. They complained that their husbands were blowing their noses in the Kleenex. The company took the hint and repositioned the tissues as a disposable alternative to the handkerchief, one that helped stop germs from spreading.
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A Norwegian town uses giant mirrors to bring in winter sun
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Rjukan, a town of about 3,500 people in Norway, sits so deep in its valley that it gets no direct sunlight for six months of the year. On October 30, 2013, it switched on a fix: mirrors.
Three computer-controlled mirrors, each 17 square metres, stand on the hills to the north of the town. They follow the sun across the sky and bounce its light down into the town square, so that in the darkest months residents can stand in a patch of sunshine.
The idea is a century old. Around 1913 the town's founder, Sam Eyde, backed a plan to redirect sunlight into the valley, but it was never completed. It took a local artist, Martin Andresen, to campaign for it again. The project cost five million kroner, paid for by the industrial company Norsk Hydro, the municipality and Koro, Norway's public art body.
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Gmail launched on April Fools' Day and people assumed a prank
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Google announced Gmail on April 1, 2004, and plenty of people assumed it was a joke. Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a habit of April Fools' pranks, including a fake job listing for research on the Moon, and the offer itself sounded too good: a free gigabyte of storage per account.
At the time, that was room for about 13,500 emails, at a time when the leading services from Yahoo and Microsoft held something like 30 to 60. Paul Buchheit, Google's 23rd hire and one of the people who built Gmail, later said the disbelief was part of the charm.
Getting in was another matter. Google only had the computing capacity for about 10,000 users at first, so Gmail was invitation-only, and Buchheit said invitations sold for $250 each on eBay. Google opened it to everyone in 2007.
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New York's Museum of Modern Art owns the original 176 emoji
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In 1999 the Japanese phone company NTT DoCoMo released a set of 176 tiny pictures for its mobile phones, designed by Shigetaka Kurita. Each one was a simple image of 12 by 12 pixels, and the set included a smiley face, a snowman, hearts and an old-school mobile phone.
For years they stayed mostly in Japan, where other companies copied them. According to Time, they did not go global until Apple added them to the iPhone in 2011.
In October 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that it had acquired the original 176, a gift from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, and planned to show them in its lobby from December alongside printed and animated designs.
What strikes me is how much of the way we now talk online grew out of a grid of 144 pixels.
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If you only retell one today, make it the Gmail invitations going for $250.
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