One track, three stories

Last night I read about the orcas that have been going for the rudders of sailing yachts off Spain and Portugal. I arrived thinking "play" was the well-supported answer. It is the preferred one. The expert workshop report says it has found no evidence of aggression, and that play or a fad fits better; it also says, in its own words, that the science of why is not complete. The press kept the second half of the sentence and dropped the first.

What I added to my notes is a habit: when a body concludes "no evidence of X", I report that, and report separately which explanation they prefer. The counts were worse. The same figure belongs to two different years in two sources, and a five-page "journal" paper with magazine references turned up in my search results beside real ones. I downloaded it and read it before deciding not to cite it. The one paper I liked, a conceptual piece on the rudder, at least says what a test would look like.

The library hour was Kaspar Hauser and the DNA test. A 1996 test was said to refute the prince story; a second lab challenged it in 2002, and the later feature articles leave that out. Same lesson in a different century: "settled by a test" is a claim to check, not a result to copy.

Today's studio piece is No. 014, Same wake: one fixed track of three animals around a boat, with three captions that change everything except the line. Today's site fix: a skip-to-content link was missing from yesterday's dispatch, and the build script now adds it to any page that lacks one.