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Yesterday I gave someone directions with total confidence and only realised on the way home that I had described the wrong bridge.
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Playing Mozart to babies rested on a study of college students
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The idea that listening to Mozart makes you smarter does not hold up, and it never applied to babies in the first place. It began with a 1993 study in Nature by Frances Rauscher and colleagues, who reported that college students did better on a spatial task after hearing Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major.
That modest finding about adults took on a life of its own. In 1998 Zell Miller, then governor of Georgia, proposed that every mother of a newborn receive a free classical music CD, and the same year Florida required state-funded day-care centres to play classical music for at least an hour a day.
In 2010 a team at the University of Vienna, led by Jakob Pietschnig, pooled about 40 studies with more than 3,000 participants for a meta-analysis in the journal Intelligence. Their conclusion was blunt: there is no support for gains in spatial ability that come specifically from listening to Mozart.
What bothers me about this one is how far the story travelled from the data, from an effect in college students to state policy for newborns. Pietschnig's own advice was kinder than mine: keep listening to Mozart, just not in the hope of a cognitive boost.
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Shoppers refused the first shopping trolleys, so the inventor hired fakes
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On June 4, 1937, the Humpty Dumpty grocery store in Oklahoma City introduced the first official shopping cart. Sylvan Goldman had built his prototype the year before from two folding chairs placed seat to seat, with wheels underneath and a basket on top.
At first, nobody wanted to push it. Women told him they had pushed enough baby strollers already, and men considered pushing a cart emasculating, a job for women.
So Goldman hired attractive models to shop in the store while confidently pushing the carts, to show everyone else how easy it was. A piece of equipment nobody would touch needed actors before it could find customers. It worked. By 1940 grocers faced a seven-year waiting list for his carts, and that same year he began producing the nesting cart, designed to slide into the one in front of it.
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Everest's official height rose 86 centimetres when two countries agreed
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On December 8, 2020, Nepal and China jointly announced a new official height for Mount Everest: 8,848.86 metres. For decades Nepal had recognised 8,848 metres as the official snow height, a figure that came from a Survey of India study in the early 1950s.
China's earlier figure was about four metres lower than the new one, so for years the world's tallest mountain had two official heights depending on which side of the border you asked. More recent measurements had produced different numbers again, and there was speculation that the 2015 earthquake or global warming might have changed things.
To settle it, Nepal sent a team of surveyors to the summit in May 2019, and China sent its own in 2020. The agreed figure now sits slightly above Nepal's old number and well above China's.
The mountain, as far as anyone can tell, did not notice.
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The famous computer bug note was an engineers' joke
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On September 9, 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth trapped in a relay, taped it into the logbook and wrote beside it: first actual case of bug being found. The logbook, moth still attached, is now held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
The story is usually told as the origin of the word bug. The note itself says otherwise. First actual case only makes sense as a joke if bug already meant a fault, and it did. Thomas Edison was using the word in 1878, writing of bugs as the little faults and difficulties of invention.
The moth is also often credited to Grace Hopper. She certainly made the story famous, but the Smithsonian notes that the logbook was probably not hers, and who actually found the insect has never been settled. What the page preserves is engineers enjoying a pun at the expense of a very real moth.
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Every wobbly word you typed online helped digitise an old book
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For years, the distorted words you typed to prove you were human were doing a second job. A system called reCAPTCHA, developed by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, used words taken from old, weathered books that computer text recognition could not read.
Every time someone typed one in, they were transcribing a scrap of a real book. In its first year, users transcribed the equivalent of 160 books a day, more than 440 million words, according to Scientific American, which reported the results published in the journal Science in 2008.
Scattered across millions of people, the work was more accurate than the machines. On five Times articles, reCAPTCHA reached 99.1 percent accuracy, against 83.5 percent for standard text recognition software.
The New York Times used it to help digitise its archive all the way back to 1851.
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If you only have time for one retelling today, go with the fake shoppers.
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