Does pushing that button really do anything?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting article by Justin Pot at Popular Science on May 24, 2026 titled 3 buttons that don’t actually do anything. Pushbuttons that don’t do anything immediately would have been a better title. His examples are pedestrian crosswalk buttons, elevator door close buttons, and office wall thermostat buttons.

 

A pedestrian crosswalk button at an intersection, like the one shown above, might activate the cycle for a walk light. But during peak traffic hours it might not do anything, because the crosswalk light cycle is being automatically included.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elevator door close buttons don’t act immediately - because the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) calls for a time delay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And changing the temperature setting on an office wall thermostat may not have any effect at all. There is a Wikipedia article titled placebo buttons about that topic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I have never seen a nonfunctional button marked like the one shown above.

 

The thermostat and elevator buttons were modified from images at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

A book about what we eat with a global history of food

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Via interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I got a 344-page 2025 book by Pierre Singaravelou and Sylvain Venayre (editors) titled What We Eat: A global history of food. There are 88 brief un-numbered chapters with the following titles, which I have been skimming:

 

Acheke, Bagels, Baguette, Banh Mi, Barbecue, Beer, Beet Sugar, Cassoulet, Caviar, Ceviche, Champagne, Charcuterie, Chicory, Chile con Carne, Chili Pepper, Chorba, Christmas Pudding, Coca-Cola, Coffee, Condensed Milk (Sweetened), Cornflakes, Couscous, Curry, Dafina, Dim Sum, Dogmeat, Doner Kebab, Feijoada, Fish and Chips, Fish Sauce (Nuoc Mam), Food Coloring and Preservatives, Freeze-Dried Foods, French Fries, Gin, Guacamole, Hamburger, Harissa, Hedgehog Stew, Hot Dogs, Hummus, Ice Cubes, Indomie, Injera, Ketchup, Lato, Maki, Margarine, Mate, Matzah, Mayonnaise, Naan, Noodles and Macaroni, Olive Oil, Orangina, Oyster, Palm Oil, Parmesan Cheese, Pepper, Pet Food and Treats, Pho, Pizza, Poke, Port Wine, Raki, Ramen, Rooibos, Roquefort, Rum, Sake, Salt, Sandwich, Sardines (Canned), Singapore Noodles, Soy Sauce, Spam. Sparkling Water, Suhi, Tapioca, Tea and Chai, Tikka, Tofu, Turkish Delight, Vanilla and Vanillan, Vodka, Whiskey, Wine, Yak Butter, and Yogurt.

 

It really should have been subtitled A Global History of Food and Drink, since there are 18 chapters about beverages.

 

This book is a good starting point for doing a speech about a food or foods, possibly including a demonstration. But not all the information in it is correct. The chapter on ramen has a paragraph on page 253 which claims that:

 

“A few years after the end of the American occupation, an invention enabled the dish to conquer households: freeze-dried ramen, launched by entrepreneur Ando Momofuku in 1958, who based his marketing on the official recommendations of the Ministry of Health. The Japanese were not eating enough wheat or meat, they argued. Momofuku’s first freeze-dried noodles, Nisshin Chikin Ramen, with their chicken broth, effectively compensated for all these shortcomings at a reasonable price.”

 

Noodle blocks in that ramen really were deep-fried, not freeze-dried. See the Wikipedia pages on Instant noodles and Ramen.

 

The food cartoon came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

Covering your floor with tilings (tessellations)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We could find a speech topic just by looking down at the floor of a room. Our bathrooms have a grid consisting of brown 20“ square tiles. (Back when I was growing up we had much smaller white hexagonal tiles). You also could use triangles. There are Wikipedia pages for a Triangular tiling, a Square tiling, and a Hexagonal tiling. The mathematical term is Tessellation, for which Wikipedia says:

 

“A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps." 

 

Tiling can have translational symmetry (be periodic) or not (be aperiodic). There is a Wikipedia page for Penrose tiling that begins:

 

“A Penrose tiling is an example of an aperiodic tiling. Here, a tiling is a covering of the plane by non-overlapping polygons or other shapes, and a tiling is aperiodic if it does not contain arbitrarily large periodic regions or patches. However, despite their lack of translational symmetry, Penrose tilings may have both reflection symmetry and fivefold rotational symmetry. Penrose tilings are named after mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who investigated them in the 1970s.

 

There are several variants of Penrose tilings with different tile shapes. The original form of Penrose tiling used tiles of four different shapes, but this was later reduced to only two shapes: either two different rhombi, or two different quadrilaterals called kites and darts. The Penrose tilings are obtained by constraining the ways in which these shapes are allowed to fit together in a way that avoids periodic tiling.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More recently single aperiodic tiles (monotile or ein stein for one stone) were found, like the hat shown above. The hat got mentioned at the beginning of a monologue at Jimmy Kimmel Live on March 29, 2023 For more detail, watch this 5-1/ 2 minute YouTube video by Aylien on June 2, 2023 titled Finally, a true Aperiodic Monotile. There also is an 18 minute video from Up and Atom on September 3, 2023 titled How a Hobbyist Solved a 50-Year-Old Math Problem (Einstein Tile).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There also are a Turtle, and a Spectre. 

 

If you want to see the math, there is one 91-page pdf article by David Smith et al. at Combinatorial Theory in 2024, (Volume 4, Number 1) titled An Aperiodic Monotile. A second 25-page pdf article (also by David Smith et al.) in Combinatorial Theory for 2024, Volume 4, Number 2 is titled A Chiral Aperiodic Monotile.

 

How did I find this topic? I read about it in Matt Parker’s 2024 book Love Triangle: How trigonometry shapes the world. In his chapter five, Well Fit, the final section is titled Don’t Make Me Repeat Myself:

 

“For a long time, the holy grail for mathematical tiling patterns was a polygon that could perfectly cover a surface but in a way that never repeats. One thing all the tiling patterns we’ve seen so far have in common is that they repeat periodically. I only had to give the builders a small diagram of snub-square tiling because once they got the pattern correct it could be repeated forever. Easy.

 

Mathematicians dreamed of a shape that sat right on the cusp between order and chaos. Some polygons are able to cover a surface with no gaps in a neat pattern, and others cannot fit together without gaps. But imagine a shape that brings both sides together; it cannot form a repeating pattern yet it still can cover a surface.

 

This mystical tiling pattern is called ‘aperiodic.’ A lot of tiles can form a ‘non periodic’ pattern: square tiles can be arranged with each row offset a different, irrational amount from the previous. Technically, this is a pattern that never repeats. But an aperiodic pattern involves the stronger condition that it is impossible to arrange the tiles in a periodic fashion. Square tiles could be knocked back into a periodic pattern and so they don’t count.

 

The first set of aperiodic tiles was found in 1964, but it involved combining 20,426 different shapes of tiles together. By 1974 this had been reduced to a set of two shapes, called Penrose tiles, which were aperiodic as a team, but the search was still on for a monotile that could be aperiodic all on its own. This mysterious, hypothetical shape was often called the ‘einstein’ as a hilarious German-language pun on ‘one stone.’

 

Even though mathematicians had yet to find an Einstein tile, they did know some things about what it must be like (if it did exist). Recall Rao’s proof from 2017 showing that all the convex pentagons that could tile had been found. This completed the search for all convex polygons, and every single one that could cover a surface did so in a nice periodic fashion. If there was an aperiodic monotile out there, it was not convex. It must have concave, sticking-in bits.

 

In 2010 an Einstein was discovered! But it was a terrible shape. The Socolar-Taylor tile, named after its discoverers, was an aperiodic monotile but it wasn’t contiguous. Several little disjointed pieces all made up, technically, ‘one tile.’ Having tiles each made from a collection of disparate parts did feel unsatisfactory. In a follow-up publication the discoverers described it as ‘an Einstein according to a reasonable definition’ Which is absolutely true. But both mathematicians and builders agreed that each tile being a solid piece was an even more reasonable definition.

 

Then in March 2023 it was found. The first ever aperiodic monotile. See if you can guess if it was someone messing around on their kitchen table at home or an advanced computer search! Answer to follow. I remember the release vividly: the news broke on March 21 and on March 22 I was due to give a public lecture at the Royal Society in London called ‘Every Interesting Bit of Maths Ever.’ A swift rewrite ensued.

 

The excitement was instant. It swept through the maths world very quickly, and the mainstream media was not far behind. Th mathematicians who had found the shape had dubbed it ‘the Hat’ because thy thought it looked like a hat. It has also been claimed to look a lot like a shirt. The point is, it was a nice, tidy, public-friendly shape. Before long people were 3D printing them, baking cookies shaped like them. My friend, Aliean MacDonald showed up for my Royal Society lecture in a Hat-covered dress she had made herself.

 

There was something about the Hat that made it popular with the public and mathematicians alike: it was surprisingly simple. Given this shape had been eluding the entire mathematics community for over half a century, nobody expected it to be so straightforward. It’s a 13-sided polygon, far fewer sides than I would have predicted. It’s concave, as expected, but it doesn’t have any detached, fragmented bits or any holes. When I look at it, I see a slightly modified equilateral triangle. Even in the research paper announcing its discovery says, ‘The shape is almost mundane in its simplicity.

 

None of this is to devalue the incredible feat of finding the Hat. It was discovered by a retired print technician, David Smith, doing some recreational maths at home on his kitchen table. He had been designing shapes in a tiling software package when he outlined the Hat and realized there was no obvious way to arrange it in a tiling pattern But it looked like it should fit together nicely. David cut 30 of them out of cardboard and found they did fit together but with no obvious pattern Another 30 copies were cut out and added to the tiling; still no pattern.

 

He contacted mathematician Craig Kaplan, who used some adopted software to explore how far the Hat could tile. It tiled further than any other known non-tiling shape, which strongly suggested the Hat could indeed cover any infinite surface. Yet the patterns it formed were not periodic. More mathematicians were recruited, and soon they managed to prove that the Hat was indeed an aperiodic monotile. For completeness they even proved it two different ways. The first proof was done using a computer, which worked but didn’t offer any insight into why the shape was aperiodic. As they said in the paper, ‘These calculations are necessarily ad hoc, and are essentially unenlightening.’ So they proved it again in a much more satisfactory way. There was now no doubt this was the Einstein shape everyone had been looking for.

 

Then David found another one.

 

Dubbed ‘the Turtle’, it was a second example of an Einstein. It felt wildly unlikely that two unrelated einsteins would be found so close together by the same person. And, after a bit of digging, the tile team found that the Hat and the Turtle were in fact two members of the same ‘family’ of tiles. This is the same as how we consider all rectangles part of the same family of shapes, each member of the family having a different ratio between the two edge lengths. Actually, since the ratio in a rectangle can be anything, the family of rectangles is infinite. The same is true of the Hat family, but it’s a less straightforward ratio. The original Hat is made from two different side-lengths ( 1 and Ö3) and those lengths can be varied to produce other einsteins.  

 

When the side-lengths are the other way around, Ö3 and 1, the resulting shape is the Turtle. All the other ratios work as well, with three exceptions. If the entire infinite family of Hat tiles was put in a line, and labeled with their distinguishing two side-lengths, it would start with tile 0, 1 and end with tile 1, 0. Both of these end tiles are not technically aperiodic. They can be arranged to be nonperiodic but also have alternate periodic arrangements.

 

Strangely, the very middle 1, 1 tile is also not aperiodic. For a shape to be aperiodic it needs to walk a very fine line between order and chaos; too much order and it becomes periodic; too much chaos and it ceases to completely cover a surface. Having the two edge lengths the same tips this middle class into having just enough order to be periodic. But, on the plus side, we are still left with infinitely many other shapes that do work.

 

Classic maths. You wait half a century for one aperiodic monotile and then infinitely many of them show up at once. The only slight disappointment was that all of these tilings use the reflection of the tile within the tiling. Which is something the mathematicians are OK with, but actual bathroom tiles and paving blocks come with a front and a back. So, annoyingly, the Hat would not make a good bathroom tile. For that a new Einstein will need to be found that tiles without using its reflection. We can only hope.

 

And that hope has already paid off! In May 2023 the same team came back with a chiral aperiodic monotile – one that tiles without using reflections – just over two months after the first Einstein had been announced. I will add that two months was the perfect amount of time for the mathematics-communication community to have just finished work on all manner of podcasts, videos, blog posts, and magazine articles telling the ‘definitive’ story of the Einstein before bam: all obsolete. (Goodness knows what will be announced the second this book gets published.)

 

This new shape was named ‘the Specter’ [sic], and it was also hiding in plain sight. David found it right in the middle of the Hat family: it’s the shape with 1, 1 edges that we had previously discounted! All of the Hat tilings that were aperiodic needed to use their reflections, but it was the reflection of the 1, 1 tile that stopped it from being aperiodic. If reflections were banned then it would become aperiodic. David and the team realized that by curving the edges in a special way they could remove the ability for the reflected version to fit at all, turning the Specter [sic] into a ‘strictly chiral aperiodic monotile.’ Mission accomplished!

 

I feel like, over time, the general public gradually builds up the capacity to pay attention to a breaking maths story (like a video-game power bar), and the Hat came out at just the right time, depleting the reservoir of excitement. When the Specter [sic] was announced two months later it didn’t even register as a blip on the mainstream media or in the public consciousness. Sure, maths people were super excited – this was arguably the more amazing result – but the general populace had no need for another new shape so soon. Even though this one is ideal for tiling a bathroom.

 

At the time of writing I am wondering what the next startling new shape will be. It could come from anywhere. I have contacted the Hat team to double-check they don’t have some other new tilings to be announced the moment I finalize this manuscript. Because after they found the whole Hat family and saw how nonexotic the shapes were, they wrote, ‘We might therefor hope that a zoo of interesting new monotiles will emerge in its wake,’

 

I also hope it does. But not until the next edition of this book.”    

 

 

Should we worry about getting cancer from eating burnt toast?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not really. In 2025 Joe Schwarcz published a book titled Better Not Burn Your Toast: The Science of Food and Health. Although there potentially is an acrylamide hazard there is little risk. (I don’t like the taste so I just take a butter knife and scrape off the thin black burnt top layer). A more recent article by Joe Schwarcz at the McGill Office for Science and Society on April 24, 2026 titled Just How Much Should You Worry About Eating That Burnt Toast? discusses it:

 

“Acrylamide forms when the amino acid asparagine and some sugars, mainly glucose, fructose and galactose are heated together to a high temperature. Since asparagine and these sugars are present in many foods and since roasting, baking and frying are common cooking techniques, ingestion of acrylamide is unavoidable. But how much should we worry about its carcinogenicity? 

 

…. In rodents treated with acrylamide, usually in their drinking water, carcinogenic effects begin to be noted when they have consumed about 0.5 mg per kg body weight per day.

 

…. The acrylamide content of many foods has been determined in the lab and human exposure can be calculated from food frequency questionnaires. Typical human exposure turns out to be about 0.3 to 0.6 micrograms per kg body weight per day. This is a thousand times less than the minimal dose that can cause cancer in test animals!” [1 mg = 1000 micrograms]

 

There is another article from Joe Schwarcz in the Montreal Gazette on November 6, 2015 titled The Right Chemistry: No, eating a hotdog is not the same as smoking in which he discusses acrylamide from eating French fries:

 

“Before long scary headlines appear in the lay press: ‘Bacon poses same cancer risk as cigarettes!’ People panic and industry attempts to sooth fears with arguments about poor-quality research, cherry-picked data and calculations about the gross amounts of food that would have to be eaten for the claimed effect to arise: ‘One would have to consume over 150 pounds of French fries every day in order to increase the risk of cancer from acrylamide.’ or, ‘just because we can measure something does not mean the levels are toxic; for farmed salmon, PCB levels were about 3 per cent of the allowable limit of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization and the European Union.’ ”

 

And there are also web pages titled Acrylamide and Cancer Risk both from the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute.

 

Recent research is discussed in a massive (27-page pdf) article by Burhan Basaran, Burcu Cuvalci, and Guzin Kaban in Food magazine on January 11, 2023 titled Dietary Exposure and Cancer Risk: A Systematic Approach to Human Epidemiological Studies.  Their conclusions are:

 

“Acrylamide, whose presence in foods was shared with the public in 2002 and whose importance has been increasing in our lives since then, still contains many unknowns in terms of its formation mechanism, its level in foods and its effects on health. This uncertainty is a major concern when considering the potential risks of acrylamide. Therefore, more information should be obtained about all the factors that may be caused by dietary acrylamide exposure, and by managing this information, meaningful policies for public health should be produced. The high level of acrylamide in foods such as French fries, bread, biscuits and coffee, which have an important place in our daily life and which we can easily reach and consume throughout life, is an important issue that should be considered for our health. Therefore, many researchers have discussed various aspects of acrylamide, and research is still ongoing today.

In the light of the information obtained in this study, it is quite difficult to say clearly that there is a positive relationship between dietary acrylamide exposure and cancer types. In addition, no direct relationship was found with dietary acrylamide exposure on organs or systems. The lack of a standardized measurement method used by researchers also prevents the studies from being comparable. In this context, it seems that more research is needed to say whether exposure to acrylamide based on nutrition is a risk factor for developing various types of cancer. In order to obtain reliable results in explaining the relationship between dietary acrylamide exposure and cancer, it is very important that future research includes more people and foods. In addition, factors such as physical inactivity, harmful alcohol use, dyslipidemia, obesity and different chronic diseases should be considered as parameters in studies.

Additionally, databases should be established in order to evaluate dietary acrylamide exposure, and the accuracy of the information in the databases should be tested and revised according to the new information obtained. The relationship between dietary acrylamide exposure and cancer risk is unclear. It is necessary to develop new evaluation methods that detect acrylamide and other similar compounds that can lead to clinical pictures, which is the end point of the disease, such as cancer. In this respect, acrylamide and other similar compounds should be included in health policies, and researchers should be supported in terms of information and resources. In addition, legislation on foods with high levels of acrylamide should be developed.”

The image of burnt toast came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

A very detailed essay on both clapping and applause

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a very detailed 29-page pdf article (with 78 references) by Alan Crawley at Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science on June 7, 2023 [pages 1 to 29] titled Clap, Clap, Clap – Unsystematic Review Essay on Clapping and Applause. The first two paragraphs of his Conclusion are that:

 

“Clapping and applause are two different behaviors. The first is a nonverbal phonokinesic manner that mechanically produces an acoustic sound after bursting a bubble of air between both palms of the hands. Different from clapping, applauses are claps that convey a meaning of approval, most usually used in a rhythmic, repetitive sequence.

This may be the first literature review on the complex polysemic and multipurpose behavior of clapping, and even it tried to bring several interdisciplinary lenses to study the same behavior, many historical and current aspects of how it functions, its variations, frequency, and so many more aspects still are yet to understand.”

 

Functions of applause are to:

Approve

Celebrate

Show Support

Cooperate

Intimidate

 

Section titles in Alan’s article are:

Introduction

Definition

Is a Clap a Gesture?

Evolutionary Origin of Clapping

Development of Clapping During Ontogeny

Clapp as an Expression of Soft Biometric Data

Clap as an Expression of Language and Inner Thought

Clap as a Social Act

Clap as a Contagious and Synchronized Act

Why is Synchrony Important, 

  and How Does It Work in Humans?

Clapping and Social Hierarchy

Synchrony Unity and Equality

The Role of Culture in Applause and Claps

The Subjective Experience of Receiving Applause

Conclusion

 

The cartoon came from here at OpenClipArt.

 

A decorated book drop at my friendly local public library

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every time I return books at the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library I get a chuckle from using their decorated inside book drop. When I pull the handle on its drum, it rotates downward to reveal eight teeth, as is shown above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That library branch also has a drive-up book drop. Some book drops are more complicated than they appear. There may be a spring-loaded surface inside. As shown in this brief Reddit video, books do not drop all the way to the ground from the slot.  

 

There is an article by Dr. Steve Albrecht at Library 2.0 on April 5, 2024 titled Horror Stories from the Book Drop: A Recap of Items Found by Librarians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outside book drops sometimes are vandalized. Back in 2010 a disgruntled patron threw mayonnaise and other condiments into the drop at the Victory Road branch of the Ada Community Library. Another Reuters article on January 29, 2011 described how a Woman who dumped condiments in book drop pleads guilty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But that’s not the worst thing possible. Still another article by Chuck Knox in LIDAR Magazine on January 15, 2018 titled Future After Fire: The Renovation of the Eckhart Public Library said that:

 

“In the early morning of July 2nd, 2017 3 individuals were wandering the town of Auburn, Indiana looking to cause trouble. That trouble resulted in 1 of the 3 dropping a lit 1” mortar style fire firework in the return book drop box of the Eckhart Public Library. The result was an intense fire that caused an estimated 3.4 million dollars’ worth of damage to the building and its contents. The Auburn Fire Department was quickly on the scene and had the fire extinguished within 10 minutes of arriving. Even with their quick response the damage was horrific. Within a week of the fire the Auburn Police arrested Nykolas Elkin age 24 for the arson. He later admitted he placed the lit firework in the drop box; he was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison for the crime.”

 

Images of a mayonnaise jar and a fire truck came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Our tools for measuring, recording, remembering, and reasoning about time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excruciatingly detailed 22-page pdf article by Kensy Cooperrider at Topics in Cognitive Science on April 29, 2025 (Volume 18, Number 1, pages 147 to 168) titled Time Tools. He concludes:

 

“We humans come into the world with basically the same biological equipment for managing time as many other animals, and probably all other primates. But we nonetheless end up with an understanding of time that is unlike any other in the natural world. This is because we alone have developed cognitive technologies to help us grapple with temporal structures - and helpful they are. They allow us to tally, coordinate, predict, measure, record, remember, and reason; they allow us to deal with time in new, powerful ways. Though some of the consequences of time tools are quite recent, others are far older: some scholars have proposed that early time tools like seasonal calendars may have already begun to improve our foraging success in the Upper Paleolithic.

 

Our cognitive technologies for thinking about time have now become so deeply internalized, so woven into our understanding of the world, that we can barely imagine a world without them. Clocks, calendars, and timelines; seconds, minutes, hours; shared ways of talking about time as something to be saved and ‘budgeted’; ideas of time zones and deadlines and setting clocks back - these ideas are now utterly banal. Today, to not know the day of the week - an arbitrary convention par excellence—is to experience deep disorientation. Physicians check on patients’ faculties by asking them what year it is, and a common formal screening for cognitive impairment involves reading an analog clock. One of the most remarkable aspects of our time tools - and of human cognitive technologies in general - is that we grow so dependent on them that they become almost invisible.

 

Here, I have tried to shake up this feeling of invisibility - to remove, as it were, the glasses we had forgotten we were wearing. By focusing on earlier, less familiar time tools - in particular, those that came before the rise of ubiquitous ‘clock time’ - I have tried to bring into focus: first, the diversity of concepts, practices, and artifacts humans have developed for dealing with time; and, second, the universality of the practical problems that humans have used time tools to solve. The importance of our time tools is hard to overstate. Much is made –understandably - of our species’ ecological dominance, of the fact that we were able to spread over a vast swath of space, occupying niches that are completely inhospitable to other primates. Less is made of our species ‘temporal dominance,’ of the fact that we alone have learned to navigate and master - and, arguably, construct - a fourth dimension of the world. Without time tools this would have been, quite literally, unthinkable.”

 

An image of Big Ben came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

An xkcd cartoon about hazardous male-to-male extension cords

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The xkcd comic for January 23, 2026 is titled Double-Pronged Extension Cord. My colorized version is shown above. It was discussed at Explain xkcd. A Wikipedia article titled Gender of connectors and fasteners has a section on Safety that explains how this is a tragedy waiting to happen:

 

“A double-ended male connector for utility-supplied (mains) electrical power is extremely dangerous, and sometimes is called a ‘suicide cable’ or ‘widowmaker cord’. Some hardware shops explicitly refuse to make or sell them when asked by customers who have mistakenly hung a string of Christmas lights backwards and wish to connect the socket end to a wall socket, or who intend to connect a generator or inverter to their home's electrical circuit in the event of a utility power outage. The exposed prongs on the live end of the cable pose serious electrical shock and fire hazards, and when improperly used in a generator setup may cause the equipment to burn out when utility power is restored. It can also backfeed power into the grid, potentially damaging utility equipment or even electrocuting linemen attempting to restore power.^”

 

There is an article at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) web site on September 15, 2022 titled CPSC warns consumers to immediately stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon.com due to electrocution, fire, and carbon monoxide poisoning hazards. A follow-up article at Consumer Reports by Tobie Stanger on September 16, 2022 is titled Don’t Use Male-to-Male Extension Cords Sold on Amazon – or Elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For photography male-to-male extension cords sometimes were used to synchronize a pair of electronic flashes for cameras, like the suicide cable shown above. Of course, this was potentially dangerous because someone else might instead plug one end into an AC wall socket and destroy your flash. See an article at STROBIST in April 2006 titled Lighting 101: Build a Pro Synch Cord, Pt. 1.

 

The image of a suicide cable came from Wikimedia Commons. 

 

 

Before bows and arrows, hunters used spear throwers called atlatals

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a 2025 book by Sam Kean titled Dinner with King Tut: How rogue archeologists are re-creating the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations. I blogged about it in a post on January 26, 2026 titled What did Egyptian laborers who built the pyramids eat? That book has eleven chapters that cover the following dates:

 

Africa – 75,000 years ago

South America – 7500 BC

Turkey -6500s BC

Egypt – 2000s BC

Polynesia – 1000s BC

Rome – AD 100s

California – AD 500s

Viking Europe – AD 900s

Northern Alaska – AD 1000s

China – AD 1200s

Mexico – AD 1500s

 

Chapter 2, South America – 7500 BC, has a section starting on page 67 about a spear thrower (shown above) called an atlatal:

 

“The atlatl is a two-foot-long stick with a hook or spur on one side. The darts are wooden shafts with a stone point hafted to one end and a concave cup carved into the other. (Asana prefers shorter darts, a yard or so long, since they can double as spears in a pinch). To load an atlatl, you hold it at shoulder-height, parallel to the ground, and fit the cup end of the dart into the spur-hook. To fire the dart, you step forward and snap the atlatl down with your wrist. Imagine flicking paint off a paint-brush – same motion. Overall, your thigh and core generate the power, which gets channeled into the dart via the arm and snapped wrist.

 

To the uninitiated, the atlatl probably seems baroque. Why not just hurl a spear, instead of using a stick to fling it? A detailed answer would require a long digression into the physics of levers and rotational velocity, but the basic idea is this: the longer your arm, the faster you can throw something. (Think of those long plastic ball-throwers for playing with dogs.) Atlatals effectively lengthen your arm by a foot or two and therefore provide a huge speed boost: experts can fling the darts 80 mph, while spears alone top out around 50 mph. Speed is a major factor in a weapon’s penetration ability and knockdown power, so atlatl darts are pretty darn deadly.

 

Despite their obscurity nowadays, especially compared to spears or arrows, atlatls were probably the most widely used hunting weapon in prehistory, in climates from the tropics to the poles. As a result, there’s a serious contingent of atlatl enthusiasts within experimental archaeology.

 

I get to try atlatls myself during an undergraduate class that Mein Eren teaches. We meet at a frisbee golf course near campus, where he unloads several dozen atlatl darts from his pickup. Each is around six feet long and a bit less than an inch thick, and they’re fletched with fake feathers – neon, green, black-and-blue, crimson. I’m surprised how bendy they are, quite flexible. Atlatlists debate why that flexibility matters, but rigid darts simply don’t fly as straight or true: darts need spring.

 

The atlatls Eren hands out are pretty basic – wooden sticks with hooks. Most people throughout history used something similar, but the inhabitants of the treeless altiplano would have saved their wood for darts and made atlatals from the leg bones of vicunas. (I actually stumbled across one such bone on a walk in Peru. It was bleached white, and differed from traditional atlatls in that it had a kink in it. But when I whipped it downward with my wrist, it felt perfect.)”

 

And Chapter 7, California – AD 500s. has another topic starting on page 270:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Bows and arrows were the single most complicated piece of technology in prehistoric times, incorporating nearly every material used by our ancestors – wood, stone, sinew, antler, resin, rope, feathers. And while atlatals long predated them, bows and arrows eventually replaced atlatals on nearly every continent. There are several reasons why.

 

The big advantage of atlatals is that their heavy darts pack quite a punch; you can really wallop game. But as megafauna went extinct on continent after continent, the importance of landing a big blow waned in tandem. Hunting smaller game requires stealth and precision, and bows and arrows allow you to hide in a blind and snipe at game instead of scaring them off with the big clumsy movement of an atlatl toss. You also stand still while shooting them, and can sight down an arrow and take aim, something that’s impossible with the side-armed atlatl. Arrows offer a superior rate of fire, too. With atlatals, you usually get one throw before an animal flees, but it’s possible to fire several arrows in quick succession. (Some Plains Indians could keep eight in the air at once). All in all, after the decline of the megafauna, arrows proved more superior in most hunting scenarios.

 

But as with all technological advances, the switch to bows and arrows was accompanied by social upheaval. For one thing, bows and arrows seemingly favored individuals over groups. When everyone used big, slow atlatals and got just one shot at game, hunting in groups was necessary to hedge bets. In contrast, the precision and stealth of bows and arrows encouraged solitary hunting. The group became less important.

 

Arrows might also have upended the relations between the sexes. Recall from Chapter 2 that women often throw atlatals better than men. Bows and arrows, however, tend to favor males. That’s partly because men are generally taller and generally have more upper body strength, bothof which provide an advantage when shooting bows. (Arm length and arm strength allow an archer to use a stiffer bow and pull the string back farther, generating more snap). That said, it wasn’t all biology; cultural factors favored males as well. However clumsy atlatals seem at first, people could master them reasonably quickly; children as young as seven can take down deer with them. Proficiency with arrows takes more practice; few children can reliably kill game with arrows until their mid-teens. And for whatever reason, most cultures in the ancient world – in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, in the Americas – denied young females the chance to develop this skill, shunting them off to gather plant food instead. As a result, bows and arrows became a male-dominated weapon.”

 

Images of an atlatl and bow hunter came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

What did Egyptian laborers who built the pyramids eat?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a 2025 book by Sam Kean titled Dinner with King Tut: How rogue archeologists are re-creating the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations. It has eleven chapters that discuss the following dates:

 

Africa – 75,000 years ago

South America – 7500 BC

Turkey -6500s BC

Egypt – 2000s BC

Polynesia – 1000s BC

Rome – AD 100s

California – AD 500s

Viking Europe – AD 900s

Northern Alaska – AD 1000s

China – AD 1200s

Mexico – AD 1500s

 

There is also an article by Sam Kean in Nautil Us on July 9, 2025 titled How to Make the Bread That Fueled the Pyramids. Similarly, beginning on page 128 of the book he says about Egypt in the 2000s BC:

 

“From the most wretched servant to the most exalted prince, people in ancient Egypt ate bread and drank beer with every meal. These staples were so vital to their diet that, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the combined symbols for bread and beer actually meant meal or sustenance.

 

During pyramid construction, bakeries the size of football fields stood near the worker villages. Every morning, battalions of men and women would grind up bushels of emmer – the main grain eaten in Egypt – into flour on stone hand mills called querns. Still more bakers mixed and kneaded the dough, probably with their feet. To bake the bread, rather than waste time making thousands of mud ovens, crews used conical clay molds. They’d dig holes in the ground, fill them with glowing embers, drop the molds in upside-down, plop some dough in, then cap each mold with a second one and heap hot ash over the top. The endless rows of these devices made the lot behind the baking huts look like giant egg cartons.

 

Timing was critical. The glowing embers had to be ready the same time as the dough was, and the bread had to finish just as the construction crews and other laborers were lining up for meals. Given the immense scale, there was a factory feel to the operation, and someone like Amon was as much a foreman as a baker, equally concerned with workflow and worker training as he was flour quality or seasoning.

 

….Blackley shows me his replica mold. It’s scorched black and much heftier than I expect – fifteen inches across and probably twenty pounds.

 

As a treat, Blackley has also baked a loaf for me to sample. It’s a foot wide and sand colored with a springy crust. It consists of just a handful of ingredients – salt, yeast, coriander, emmer flour – and its blunted shape reminds me of NASA space capsules [like the Apollo] from the 1960s.  

 

….Beyond bread, Egyptian laborers were paid in beer as well – 1 1/3 gallons daily, roughly ten pints, which they happily sucked down given that temperatures on the hot sands could reach 130^oF. (One scholar estimated that it took 231 million gallons of beer to build the largest pyramid). Even children drank beer, largely because the alcohol killed microbes and rendered it more sanitary than the water in rivers (a.k.a. their sewers). Egyptian doctors also prescribed beer as medicine to remedy coughs, constipation, swollen eyes, and upset stomachs.”

 

The Giza pyramid image came from Wikimedia Commons.

Exnovation is the opposite of innovation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On December 20, 2024 I posted on A comic strip about flipping prefixes from ex- to in-. The opposite direction also works. There is an article by Hector P. Rodriguez et al. at The Milbank Quarterly in 2016 (Volume 94 number 3, pages 636 to 653) titled The Exnovation of Chronic Care Management Processes by Physician Organizations whose opening states:

 

“Exnovation is the process of removal of innovations that do not improve organizational performance, are too disruptive to routine operations, or do not fit well with the existing organizational strategy, incentives, structure, and/or culture. John Kimberly first coined the term in 1981 to describe the removal process at the tail end of the innovation cycle.”

 

Exnovation isn’t either the Merriam-Webster or Oxford English dictionaries. But there is a Wikipedia page on Exnovation, and a LinkedIn Pulse article by Joanne Hagerty on June 24, 2025 titled We Need to Talk About Exnovation.

 

There is a more detailed discussion in the 2023 book by Juergen Howaldt and Christoph Kaletka titled Encyclopedia of Social Innovation (Chapter 10 page 56) which you can read here at Google Books:

 

“Exnovation ‘occurs when an organization divests itself of an innovation in which it has previously invested’ (Kimberly 1981, p. 91). Kimberly offers the example of an organization, which adopted videotape equipment to record staff meetings. Subsequently, the organization no longer actively uses the equipment, its popularity fades away, but the equipment is still there, and costs the organization space and money. Exnovation, in Kimberly’s sense is the active divestment of the innovation) i.e., here the videotape equipment), not just discontinued use. He observes that there are several reasons for exnovating; another innovation replaces the old one, for example the organization might switch to Zoom recordings, or the innovation might turn out not to be justified (perhaps, it was just a bad idea to record the meetings in the first place). The underlying reasons for exnovating might be due to beliefs about the performance of different technologies, due to imitation of other organizations, or result from a change in policy support. In short, exnovation is a rich and complex topic. It is also a topic that is widely ignored due the prevailing pro-innovation bias in innovation studies (more on this below). In a few pages of his 1981 article, Kimberly introduces exnovation along with key considerations for further development.

 

Subsequent research extended the scope of the definition beyond organizations and technology. ‘Expanding on Kimberly’s definition, we understand exnovation as the purposive termination of existing (infra) structures, technologies, products, and practices’ Heyen et al. 2017, p. 326). In this wider sense, exnovation depends on actors across social spheres. The extended definition provides a fertile soil for social innovation research since the latter calls for a shift from a reductive focus on technological change in business contexts to one on change of practices across social spheres (Howaldt et al. 2014) (- SOCIAL INNOVATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE). In light of these developments, social exnovation can be defined as the deliberate termination of social practices, and the change in goals and relations as well as materials and techniques required for this.”