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I found a parking space on the first try this morning, so I suspect the day has already peaked.
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Practice explains less of expertise than the 10,000-hour rule suggests
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The 10,000-hour rule was coined in Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers, and the version that stuck is simple: put in enough hours and you can be world class at anything. In 2014 a team of psychologists decided to check how well practice actually predicts performance.
Brooke Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick and Frederick Oswald found many studies on the subject, kept the 88 that met their criteria, with a combined 11,135 participants, and published a meta-analysis in Psychological Science. Across all of them, deliberate practice explained about 12 percent of the differences in how well people performed.
The share changed a lot from field to field. In games such as chess and Scrabble it was about 26 percent, in music, such as piano and violin, about 21 percent, and in sports such as soccer and wrestling about 18 percent. In education, which included an undergraduate psychology class, it dropped to about 4 percent, and in professions such as computer programming it was less than 1 percent.
I find this oddly reassuring. Practice clearly matters, and nobody learns the violin by thinking about it. It simply accounts for a smaller slice of the gap between people than the slogan promised.
The other 88 percent, at least in this analysis, comes down to something else.
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Play-Doh started life as a wallpaper cleaner
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Kutol Products, founded in Cincinnati in 1912, became the world's biggest maker of wallpaper cleaner in the early twentieth century. Its main product was a soft, doughy compound for wiping coal soot off the walls.
Then the soot went away. In the 1950s many households switched from coal heating to oil, gas or electricity, and demand for the cleaner fell. Joseph McVicker was trying to keep the company alive when his sister-in-law, Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher, read that wallpaper cleaner could be used for modelling projects.
She tried the nontoxic dough with children, who loved squashing it into shapes, and she suggested a name for it: Play-Doh. McVicker set up a new company, Rainbow Crafts, and the dough went on sale as a toy in 1956. The first shop to stock it was Woodward & Lothrop, a department store in Washington, DC, and Macy's and Marshall Field's soon followed.
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The ocean's loneliest spot is named after a fictional captain
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Point Nemo is the place in the ocean farthest from land. It sits in the South Pacific at 48°52.6′S, 123°23.6′W, about 2,688 kilometres from the nearest shore.
That shore lies in three directions at once. To the north is Ducie Island, part of the Pitcairn Islands. To the northeast is Motu Nui, a small islet off Easter Island. To the south is Maher Island, off Antarctica.
Draw a circle of that size around the point and the only thing inside it is water. A circle with a radius of 2,688 kilometres is wider than most countries, and it touches land only at its edges.
Nemo is Latin for no one, which suits a place that so few people will ever see. NOAA notes that the point is named after the famous submarine sailor in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
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The first digital camera weighed 8 pounds and took 23 seconds
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In December 1975 Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, finished building what the IEEE now recognises as the original digital camera.
It was about the size of a toaster and weighed 8 pounds, roughly 3.6 kilograms. Its sensor was a charge-coupled device of 100 by 100 pixels, which works out at 0.01 megapixels. Each picture took 23 seconds to record onto a cassette tape.
Looking at the photo was a separate project. The camera had no screen of its own, so the image had to be played back on a television, and getting it off the tape took another 23 seconds. Retrieval, in other words, doubled the wait.
The IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organisation, has since listed the camera as one of its official engineering milestones.
Every phone camera since sits somewhere in the family tree of that toaster-sized box.
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The word meme was coined in 1976, long before the internet
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The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He needed a name for a unit of cultural transmission: something that spreads from mind to mind, the way a gene is passed from body to body.
His examples were tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions and ways of making pots or building arches. He began with mimeme, from a suitable Greek root, then trimmed it because he wanted a single syllable that sounded a bit like gene. According to Merriam-Webster, it should rhyme with cream.
It is a neat bit of history: a word coined for ideas that copy themselves from person to person ended up being copied from person to person itself. Decades later it found its most famous home. Merriam-Webster now also defines a meme as an amusing or interesting item, such as a captioned picture or video, that is spread widely online, especially through social media.
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If you only retell one today, make it the 8-pound camera that needed a television.
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