52 Things I Learned In 2022
Long but, as always, a partial list.
I learned a bunch last year. Here are 52 notable items along with some bonus materials.
See here for prior years: 2021, 2020, 2019
Note that I have forgotten or misplaced the original source that gave me some of these insights—my apologies.
Apropos of this list as an annual goal for me, New Year’s resolutions actually work fairly well and the timing of them is the difference maker—Jan 1 isn’t completely arbitrary. [David Epstein]
While having “traditional” Christmas movie traditions is common, I did not know that for Italians this includes the 1980s classic Trading Places. [Wanted in Rome]
Santa is great. So why not have three like they do in Slovenia? [99% Invisible]
Henry Ford started Kingsford Charcoal company so as to use the scrap wood and sawdust generated through production of the model T. A great example of how pollution and waste are costs and opportunities when the incentive structure is right (free-market, profit-driven economies). [Collaborative Fund]
The currency of Brazil, the Real, gets its name very literally from what started as a fake currency scheme to help stop inflation expectations. [NPR]
When thinking about skyscrapers, a mysterious though counterintuitive question is “why are they so short?” It turns out they have some interesting constraints on their height including their usable height: “The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building, is perhaps the ultimate example of this, with the top 29% of the building being unoccupied space.” The three main constraints on building height are gravity, lateral tolerances, and economic. I found this table interesting:
The world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown was heroically stopped by Jimmy Carter, who would of course one day become U.S. president, saving Canada’s capital city of Ottawa. The actions he took included lowering himself into the reactor absorbing a year’s worth of radiation in mere minutes. [Jeff Lundeen on Twitter]
We don’t know why lightning happens or the origins of golf or April Fool’s Day among many other mysteries. [Wikenigma - lightning article]
I learned lots about treasure hunting: Silver deteriorates; maritime laws including if you find a ship with a canon on it this is bad since salvage laws don’t apply to naval ships, 12 vs 100 miles off shore, and being a tow “truck” for ships is very lucrative; treasure hunting is not just zero sum as it funds museums, new tech, and hobbies have value. [Chip Forsythe on The Political Orphanage with Andrew Heaton]
Iodine is added to salt as a result of a controlled experiment in 1916-20 in Akron, Ohio that proved a 100% efficacy against the disease of endemic goiter. [Cleveland.com with a hat tip to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History]
It was originally mandatory that Supreme Court justices ride a horse as they were required to ride a horse throughout a judicial district (circuit), which is the source of the term circuit court. The practice ended in 1911. [Wikipedia with a hat tip to Andrew Heaton’s The Political Orphanage]
Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the San Francisco government’s top guy on homelessness. Bonus: Many more intriguing details of 1970s politics in SF and ugly left-wing extremism all from Scott Alexander’s review of Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko. [Astral Codex Ten]
The observation deck of the Statue of Liberty’s torch has been closed for over 100 years because of a massive, deadly explosion in 1916 on Black Tom island—an act of German agent sabotage. [The Bowery Boys]
The little square at the northern border of Minnesota known as the Northwest Angle is a small U.S. “island” (bordered by water on three sides and Canada on the other) that is there by mistake. [The Guardian]
The modern Olympic Games once included artistic categories like poetry. In 1906, the IOC unveiled five artistic categories: architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. It later added new subcategories in the arts, like orchestra, dramatic works, even town planning. [99% Invisible]
For hundreds if not thousands of years people slept in two shifts. This “biphasic sleep” or two sleeps involved one in the early evening and one in the early morning. Contemporary “full night sleeping” might be a modern invention. [BBC]
John Nestor was a man notorious in Washington DC for his driving habit of getting into the fast lane and setting his cruise control to the legal limit of 55 mph and staying there—steadfastly adhering to the law. He was also part of the group at the FDA who delayed the approval of beta-blockers well after they were approved in Europe, et al.—steadfastly adhering to U.S. law. It is believed as many as 100,000 people died waiting for the FDA to act. [Competitive Enterprise Institute]
Roadkill has been around for centuries and occurs at a very high volume. It is estimated that as many as 365 million vertebrates are killed per year. [Vox]
The firepole was invented by the first black fire company, Engine Company 21 in Chicago, in the 1870s. [Wikipedia]
The S. S. Minnow boat in the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island was named after Newton Minow, chairman of the FCC at the time, who famously called television “a vast wasteland”. [Wikipedia]
According to critics The Beach Boys album Pet Sounds is the greatest music album of all time. [Acclaimed Music with a hat tip to Holden Karnofsky]
Triple Divide Peak, MT is a place along the Rocky Mountain Continental Divide where a raindrop falling upon it could go north to the Arctic Ocean, west the the Pacific Ocean, or east to the Atlantic Ocean. [Dr. Brad Pitcher on Twitter]
There is a secret joke hidden in the Silence of the Lambs most famous line. A probable treatment for Hannibal Lecter would have been monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) which interact very dangerously with the foods liver, beans, and wine. [Independent]
There are six state capitals west of Los Angeles. [Google results—not sure, but I think I first saw this in the daily email from Morning Brew in the puzzle section]
Despite being 3,100 wide from east to west (what would equate to five geographic time zones), China has one legal time zone for the entire country. [Wikipedia] Bonus: China is taller (north to south) than it is wide (3,400 vs 3,100 miles). It doesn’t look this way to me.
Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal also spent most of India’s wealth building the Peacock throne. A whole lot of sacking the castle later so to speak and the largest diamond in the throne, the Kohinoor, is now part of the crown jewels of Queen Consort Camilla. [Alex Tabarrok]
“After accounting for indirect taxes and in-kind transfers, the US redistributes a greater share of national income to low-income groups than any European country.” [Tyler Cowen]
Although I knew about blackeyed peas in the southern U.S. and tamales in Mexico, I did not know to the extent there were all these country-specific and religion-specific traditional New Year’s foods. [Wikipedia]
The recent failed attempt at permanent daylight saving time brought to my attention that the U.S. tried this before in the 1970s, and people hated it. [Washingtonian]
The term “Molotov Cocktail” gets its origin as a sarcastic response to Soviets saying their bombs were humanitarian food deliveries. [Aella Girl on Twitter]
The term “Boycott” comes from someone’s name, Capt. Charles Boycott. He was the first subject of the action that bears his name. [J. Mark Powell writing at AIER]
Mexico has extremely restrictive gun laws and ONLY ONE gun store in the entire country. Part of the restrictiveness is sharp limitations on bearing guns outside of one’s home. All this despite a constitutional right to keep and bear arms. (I guess no one told the drug cartels.) [Wikipedia]
No prime minister of Pakistan has ever completed a full term in office—not even when it was a dictatorship. [Tyler Cowen]
Environmental pessimism goes back to the ancients—plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. [Pierre Desrochers]
In 1956 France banned wine in school for children under 14. In 1981 wine was banned in all schools. [Tom Forth on Twitter]
You thought the Jones Act was a stupid, crony method of punching ourselves in the face? The Foreign Dredge Act says, “hold my (American) beer.” [Zvi Mowshowitz]
Marriage counseling, which was invented by the Nazis, rarely works with only 11-18% of couples achieving notable improvements. [David Epstein]
An old joke goes: “Is the capital of Kentucky pronounced ‘LOO-is-ville’ or ‘LOO-e-ville’?” No matter the answer the response is, “It is pronounced “Frankfort.” But that joke belies the fact that Lexington is arguably the rightful capital and that the capital can be changed simply by a 66% majority decision by the state legislature. [Smiley Pete Publishing]
The enormous eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 cause great hardship including illness and death, lowered global temperatures, and made 1816 known as the year without a summer. As a knock-on effect it was potentially inspiration for great scientific and cultural advances including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. [Cautionary Tales]
Pickleball was invented in 1965 by future Congressman Joel Pritchard and his friends Barney McCallum and Bill Bell. Contrary to popular legend it gets its name from Joel’s wife Joan who thought it reminded her of a pickle boat in crew NOT from the Pritchard’s family dog, pickles. [Wikipedia]
Jumping Worms are an invasive earthworm that is considered a threat in the U.S. [Google]
A deadly heatwave git Chicago in 1995 with tragic though underreported results. [Cautionary Tales]
It is still actually not known if hot water freezes faster than cold water. I would not have believed this counter-intuitive possibility—the case for hot water freezing faster. [Quanta Magazine]
The wonderfully powerful economics adage, there’s no such thing as a free lunch (aka, There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch — TANSTAAFL) predates its most famous champion, Milton Friedman. The likely origin is a 1938 fable by Walter Morrow referring to 19th-century saloons. [Quote Investigator]
The term “Arctic” comes from the Greek for “bear” with the term “Antarctic” the meaning “opposite the bear”. [Useless Etymology]
Apropos the momentous 2022 Supreme Court reversal of Roe v Wade and Casey, the rich, developed world and Western Europe in particular have much more restrictive laws against abortion than I would have assumed. The U.S. really was (and still is in many states) an outlier in this regard. [Dynomight]
The modern peach was invented in 1875 by Samuel Rumph who tinkered with it (genetically modified it) so that it could survive transportation. [Conversable Economist]
The preeminent statistical tool the Student’s t-test was invented at Guinness, the beer company, who holds a 9,000 year lease and of course created the famous Book of Records. [The Fritzwilliam]
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was almost banned from live television. [Pessimists Archive]
In the event of a huge tragedy like nuclear war in which the Prime Minister is killed, the King of England names the successor PM. Also, when Ted Turner formed CNN in 1980, he put into place a protocol that in the event of a nuclear war the network would cut to a final signoff by simply playing “Nearer My God To Thee” until the coming explosions ended it all. [Andrew Heaton]
“The Man of the Hole or the Tanaru Indian was an indigenous person who lived alone in the Amazon rainforest in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. He was the sole inhabitant of the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, a protected indigenous territory demarcated by the Brazilian government in 2007.” [Wikipedia]
Because of the threatening environment it evolved in, guppies grow up as fast as possible reaching sexual maturity at seven weeks. The Greenland shark is the opposite due to its near threat-free environment—it isn’t ready to reproduce until age 150! They can live to perhaps 500 years of age. [Collaborative Fund]
Bonus:
The godwit bird migrates 7,000 miles from Alaska to Australia/New Zealand (depending presumably on exchange rates?) without stopping. [Richard Hanania]
The creation of the suggestion box system is credited to Japanese shōgun Yoshimune Tokugawa in the 18th century. [Tedium]
ALL of the eels in Europe and America are born in the Sargasso Sea in the Bermuda Triangle—even if they are in a landlocked area because they will travel over land and climb up dam walls to get back home to the ol’ breeding spot. [Emily Finch on Twitter]
There is a simple logic to runway numbers, and Canada doesn’t exactly follow it. They are the abbreviated forms of the 360-degree magnetic compass directions. [Patrick Chovanec on Twitter; also see this YouTube video, which includes the part about Canada being all Canada about it.]
There are various naming conventions with Pascal case and camel case being the big two. There are alternatives though like snake case and kebab case. [Cameron McKenzie at TheServerSide theServerSide THE-SERVER-SIDE the-server-side . . . see what I did there?]