52 Things I Learned in 2024
The annual partial list
I learned a lot, and here is a little of it.
Prior years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019
If you start in Seattle pointed due east and proceed forward (on a straight line from that start), you’ll start across the U.S. until hitting the Atlantic Ocean. The next country you’ll run into is Australia.
Lockheed explored the design of nuclear-powered airplanes in the 1960s.
For the first time in 20 years, imports from Mexico exceed those from China.
Italics come from Italian, were originally just another font, and when properly done have redesigned letters rather than just slanted letters.
Eating cheese when on MAOI drugs can cause your blood vessels to explode.
“Contrary to what you may have heard about the War Powers Resolution, it does not allow the president to take military action for any reason for 60-90 days without congressional approval so long as the president notifies Congress within 48 hours. . . Of the three cited authorities, not one indicates a presidential power to take unilateral (without Congress's approval) offensive military action.”
The first TV ad in America was during a sporting event, the Brooklyn Dodgers–Philadelphia Phillies baseball game, in which the watchmaker Bulova paid $9 for 9 seconds to reach perhaps 4,000 viewers—about $193 in 2024 dollars or a CPM of about $48. For reference, the CPM for the 2024 Super Bowl was about $71.
Spinach is not a particularly good source of iron. I already knew this. I didn’t know the source. It comes from the “Popeye spinach myth(s)” that starts with a false attribution that Popeye ate spinach for the iron (he did it for the Vitamin A), continues when it was believed that the original researchers behind the propaganda campaign had gotten the decimal place wrong which led them to think there was more iron in spinach than there is, and then twists as it was not a decimal error but rather a failure to adjust for the iron cooking vessel (a myth explaining a myth).
Mauritania became the last country to outlaw slavery in 1981. In spite of the ban, slavery continued to be practiced, however. Consequently, the government of Mauritania criminalized the practice of enslavement in 2007.
About 25% of UAW (the “A” stands for auto") members work in higher education.
Denver International Airport covers 53 square miles across all of the land it owns, basically equal to San Francisco.
Among many strange former Olympic sports town planning might be the worst. (I think I relearn this every four years.)
James Brown got his breakthrough by performing as a Little Richard impersonator when Little Richard couldn’t make the small gigs in favor of his rising star promotions. —From episodes 34 & 39 from Andrew Hickey's A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.
From this thread: “Road accidents cause 2.2% of deaths worldwide – more than malaria (1.1%), war (0.2%), and homicide (0.7%) combined,” and “the median age in Niger is 14.9” among other interesting items. Related: “Home to only around four percent of the world’s automobiles, Africa accounted for 19 percent of road deaths last year.”
“Richest five families in Florence from 1427 are still the richest today (archival data). Not only the top shows persistence. Any family who was in the (1427) top third is almost certain to still be there today.” —Philipp Heimberger on X
US Senator Lester Hunt committed suicide in his Senate office for the reason of been blackmailed by Republican senators over the fact that his son was gay and had been arrested. Source: Andrew Heaton, The Political Orphanage
If alcohol-secreting bacteria in your body get out of control (very rare), you can develop auto-brewery syndrome, where the bacteria themselves can make you drunk. I learned about this while reading an ACX post about the startup Lantern Bioworks that promises to have a bacterium that cures tooth decay by out competing the typical tooth-decay causing bacteria in a mouth. While this was a popular topic about 9-12 months ago, I haven’t heard an update recently.
Chevrons, « », are used for quotation marks in French, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Russian. Just some of many alternatives among the world’s languages.
Big brands and major chains like Chuck E. Cheese and IHOP operate ghost kitchen restaurants that deliver essentially the same food out of the same kitchen under different names.
Teqball is basically a combination of soccer/football and table tennis—pretty amazing stuff.
The recent good news about life expectancy is that it was on the rise again. The thing I learned in 2024 was that “it turns out there are two ways to measure mortality and life expectancy, and the one you hear about the most paints a misleadingly pessimistic picture of the future.”
South Korea and Poland are as wealthy as France and Portugal, respectively. Perhaps we need to reformulate our assignments of “developed” and “emerging” market status?
Tunnel of Eupalinos (#s 12 and 13 on DYNOMIGHT’s list)
In 1982 in response to the U.S. Border Patrol setting up roadblocks between mainland Florida and Key West to search for narcotics and illegal immigrants, the mayor and city council of Key West declared secession from the United States. The micronation they ostensibly established was the Conch Republic—the tradition of which continues to this day.
Centralia, Pennsylvania is a former mining town that is nearly abandoned. "Its population has declined from 1,000 in 1980 to five residents in 2020 because a coal mine fire has been burning beneath the borough since 1962." The fire is expected to last for decades.
A ferry service in Zadar, Croatia is believe to have been in operation since the 14th century.
No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend.
The reason Hiroshima rather than Kyoto was the target city of the first atomic bomb is simply because a particular husband and wife had fallen in love with it while there on vacation.
Stanley Williams, founder of the Crips and quadruple-murderer, “[led] an ironic double life in which he worked in a legal job as an anti-gang youth counselor in Compton while also serving as the overboss for one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles.”
The middle class is (some what surprisingly) over represented in the military while (quite surprisingly) the lowest income quintile is underrepresented. Unsurprisingly the highest quintile is greatly underrepresented.
German chocolate cake is named after a person, Samuel German.
Honolulu is the only incorporated city in Hawaii.
After his wife died having fallen from a mountain and having the same mountain block easy access to the hospital, Dashrath Manjhi spent 22 years hand carving out with just a hammer and chisel a 360’ long, 30’ long, and 25’ deep path through the mountain ridge.
To keep the flesh-eating screwworm out of North America: “… [T]he USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border. The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before.”
Steve Wozniak was a pessimist about home computers and Steve Jobs wasn’t as convinced as it would be assumed that personal computing had a big market.
Why do maple syrup bottles have that distinctively not useful tiny little handle? It is a marketing skeuomorph.
The Nintendo character Mario is named after a real person, a Seattle real estate developer who leased a warehouse to Nintendo.
There is an excellent treatment for common cold symptoms, ambroxol, that is available throughout the world as a generic having been in wide use for over 40 years . . . except not at all in the United States.
If we can ever master the ever elusive dream of nuclear fusion, there is enough deuterium in seawater to provide the world’s current power needs for 26 billion years.
“Adi and Rudi Dassler made sports shoes together – until a feud erupted between them. They set up competing companies, Adidas and Puma, and their bitter rivalry divided the sporting world, their family and even the inhabitants of their home town.” The story of the brothers is amazing made all the more remarkable since the brands they started continue so strong to this day.
The United States has astoundingly few elevators per capita compared to the rest of the world.
Jimi Hendrix was accepted into the 101st Airborne.
In 1999 440 squirrels arrived in shipment at the Schiphol airport in the Netherlands, en route from Beijing to Athens. They did not have the correct paperwork, so they could not be sent back nor allowed to continue onward. As a solution the airport staff had them literally shredded to death.
In the Netherlands “dropping” is a beloved childhood tradition whereby kids are blindfolded, driven into the woods at night, and left to figure out their own way out or to a designated spot.
The record for holding one’s breath is over 24 minutes.
Blood is the ninth-largest U.S. goods export.
I’ve always been a fan and had my own style on short versus long dashes (en dash and em dash), but I never knew they had formal names and were distinct from hyphens.
As much as 43 percent of income taxes paid by lower-income earners come from penalties on retirement accounts.
Blind people can use echo location, and non-blind can learn to do this to a limited degree in just a few days of training.
It is not only for seigniorage reasons, but also to prevent coin shortages that mints change the precious metal composition of coins overtime downgrading them to keep their intrinsic metal value below face value. “To prevent coins from being tossed into the melting pot and causing shortages, governments have typically reminted them out of cheaper material once their metal value approaches their face value. That's indeed what the U.S. monetary authorities did in 1964, when they decided to henceforth mint new dimes and quarters out of cupronickel rather than silver.”
The Laffer Curve, which was famously the foundational principle behind Reagan’s tax cut reforms, originated from a late 1300s Islamic philosopher, Ibn Khaldun.
Looking forward to learning in 2025!