Inspired by Tom Whitwell’s annual list, I kept track of some things I learned this year, one for each week. Here we go:
- Ciabatta was invented in 1982.
- “If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.”
- Purple Heart medals that were made for the planned (and then cancelled) invasion of Japan in 1945 are still being given out to wounded US military personnel.
- More than 100,000 public school students in NYC were homeless during the 2021-22 school year.
- The San Francisco subway system still runs on 5 1/4-inch floppies.
- NYPL librarians have discovered that “up to 75 percent of books published before 1964 may now be in the public domain”.
- Gangkhar Puensum, a mountain in Bhutan with an elevation of 24,836 feet (7,570 m), is the tallest unclimbed mountain in the world. (Mountaineering has been banned in Bhutan since 2003.)
- The founder of Lululemon picked that name for the company because he thought it would be funny to hear Japanese speakers try to say it. What an asshole.
- Eigengrau is the name of the dark grey color people see in the absence of light.
- Bees can make green honey.
- Baby scorpions are called scorplings.
- Alaskan finishers of the Iditarod can get a custom license plate.
- Any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves.
- Hurricanes don’t cross the equator.
- Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela sees almost 300 thunderstorms a year.
- Premier League referees are forbidden to work games played by their favorite teams (or their close rivals).
- The climate crisis has cost $16 million per hour in extreme weather damage over the past 20 years.
- The word for computer in Iceland translates to “prophetess of numbers”.
- All but two of the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters — the remaining two are from a poem by Alexander Pope.
- Bottled water has an expiration date — it’s the bottle not the water that expires.
- There are satellites that were launched in the early to mid 60s that are still operational.
- Multicellular life developed on Earth more than 25 separate times.
- US citizens or permanent residents with permanent disabilities can get a free lifetime pass to US National Parks (and other federal lands).
- If you try to pack information on a hard drive more densely than 10^69 bits/m^2, the hard drive will collapse into a black hole.
- Queen Victoria had a dog named “Looty” that was stolen from China by a British soldier while looting a palace in Peking in 1860.
- Colorado is not a rectangle — it actually has 697 sides.
- Horseshoe crabs are older than Saturn’s rings.
- Inmate is the ninth most common household type in America.
- Humans have pumped so much groundwater out of the ground that it’s changed the tilt of the Earth’s axis 31.5 inches to the east.
- “By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin — a journey of 1,000 miles — exclusively by electric trolley.”
- The Great British Kettle Surge is the simultaneous putting-on of the kettle in British households during commercial breaks of particularly popular TV programs, resulting in electricity surges.
- The Parker Solar Probe is the fastest object ever built by humans — at its closest approach to the Sun, it will reach speeds of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h), or 0.064% the speed of light.
- The top speed of zeppelins was about 80 mph (129 km/h).
- Ernest Hemingway only used 59 exclamation points across his entire collection of works.
- TIL there’s a whole genus of South American spiders whose species are named after people and things in the 1987 movie Predator, e.g. “Predatoroonops schwarzeneggeri”.
- Robert Butler, who died this year aged 95, directed the initial episodes for Batman, Star Trek, Moonlighting, Hill Street Blues, Hogan’s Heroes, and Remington Steele.
- I cannot believe this is the first I’ve heard of this: in the original Super Mario Bros., you can continue where you left off in the last game by holding A down when you press Start. This would have saved me so much time as a kid.
- Thomas Smallwood, an African American shoemaker, coined the term “Underground Railroad” in 1842.
- Swedish criminal gangs are using fake Spotify streams to launder money.
- Human ancestors almost went extinct 900,000 years ago. “A new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.”
- “People who enroll in genetic studies are genetically predisposed to do so.”
- MLB broadcaster Vin Scully’s career lasted 67 seasons, during which he called a game managed by Connie Mack (born in 1862) and one Julio Urías (born in 1996) played in.
- When the Regimbartia attenuata beetle gets eaten by a frog, rather than accepting its fate to be digested, it crawls through the frog’s bowels and emerges through its butt. “The quickest run from mouth to anus was just six minutes.”
- The rarest single-game event in baseball is not the perfect game but hitting two grand slams in one inning, which has only been done once in more than 235,000 games.
- Crab-like bodies have evolved at least five separate times in the past 250 million years.
- Almost 800,000 Maryland licence plates include a URL that now points to an online casino in the Philippines because someone let the domain registration lapse.
- From 1999 to 2020, there were 1.63 million excess deaths among Black Americans (when compared to the death rates of white Americans).
- Almost 75% of all films from the golden age of silent films (1912-1929) have been lost.
- For years beginning in 2018, every copy of macOS has included a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper.
- This San Francisco barbershop has a “silent mode” for patrons who don’t want to chat with barbers.
- According to America’s Test Kitchen, you can use your SodaStream to double the life of your salad greens.
- Deadline’s chief film critic had never played or even heard of Tetris before seeing the film about the game’s genesis.
