SEP 14 2026
Today’s Signals
“The other half dozen didn’t make the file.”
SIX THINGS. NO PROMISE THEY CONNECT.
Naturally.
MONEY / LOCAL
During the 1933 banking crisis, Pismo Beach businesses issued emergency money on clam shells. Restwell Cabins made 25¢, 50¢ and $1 versions. The larger the denomination, the larger the shell. They were numbered, signed and spent.
The dollar was having a shell of a year.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Archaeologists just unearthed a 66-million-year-old gastropod fossil at a roughly 5,000-year-old settlement in Türkiye.
But researchers think the people who lived there thousands of years ago may have found the fossil somewhere else and brought it home themselves.
So archaeologists may have discovered someone else's ancient discovery.
Finders keepers has apparently expired.
SOURCE TRAIL
You’ve probably heard this one:
Colonial prisoners supposedly couldn’t be fed lobster more than twice a week because it was considered cruel.
There’s a problem.
Versions of the story move between Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia, prisoners, servants and apprentices.
When historian J. L. Bell went looking for the underlying colonial law or petition, the modern books repeating the story didn’t provide a verifiable historical source.
We looked for the law. The lobster remains at large.
DEFINE THAT
Physarum polycephalum has no brain and no neurons.
Yet experiments have shown the slime mould navigating around obstacles, finding efficient routes and even using the slime it leaves behind as a kind of external spatial memory to avoid places it has already explored.
Scientists are still arguing about what words like learning, memory and cognition should mean when the organism doing it has no nervous system.
Please define intelligence before the yellow goo does.
CALIFORNIA / WHOOPS
In 1936, a brass plate was found in California and declared to be the plate Sir Francis Drake supposedly left here in 1579.
It became a major historical treasure.
California schoolchildren were taught about it.
Then scientists tested it.
Modern brass.
Researchers later concluded that friends of a prominent Berkeley historian had apparently made the plate as a practical joke.
The joke escaped containment.
Unfortunately, there had already been a quiz.
TECHNOLOGY
little room for reflectionThe Electrician, 1899
It interrupts our lives.
People expect immediate responses.
We’re losing time to think.
Sounds like smartphones?
In 1899, a British newspaper complained that telephone use left too little room for reflection and produced a “feverishness” in ordinary life.
In 1929, an American professor complained that telephones and other inventions allowed neighbors to turn leisure into a series of interruptions.
Technology: telephone.
Please update your panic accordingly.
