52 Things I Learned in 2025
The annual partial list
52 slices of a much bigger pie.
Prior years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019
With up to 1 million! hairs per square inch, sea otters have the densest fur in the animal kingdom.
The shortest flight in the world lasts just 53 seconds.
A half moon occurs about 2/3rds of the way to a new moon from a full moon rather than half way between them.
Moose can dive underwater up to 20’ and there is record of them being eaten by Orca.
The mating behavior and rituals of the Black Grouse in northern England.
There are solar-powered lasers in the northern Nafud Deserts of Saudi Arabia placed there to help travelers find water and navigate the terrain.
The famous Charging Bull statue that sits in the financial district in NYC and stands as a symbol of Wall Street was trucked and placed near where it sits today without permission by the artist, Arturo Di Modica. Shortly after the 1987 stock market crash, he spent $360,000 himself to create it and give it as a “Christmas gift to New Yorkers” as a thank you for the nation that welcomed him and gave him a chance. He wanted to “[S]how people that if you want to do something in a moment things are very bad, you can do it. You can do it by yourself. My point was that you must be strong.”
North Sentinel Island - Visitors have a high probability of dying. The native Sentinelese refuse any contact with the outside world and are violent to any who approach. The Indian navy protects it from outside contact as there is a five-mile prohibited zone surrounding it. Sounds like a good counter to buy-local, self-sufficient philosophies.
Birding is over a $100 billion industry, which makes it about 9x the size of the NBA.
The Taiping Civil War - “[It] was one of the largest conflicts in human history (1850–1864), with death toll estimates ranging from 20 to 30 million, far exceeding deaths in the US civil war (~750,000) with which it overlapped. The civil war destabilized Qing China, weakening it against foreign powers and shaped the trajectory of 19th- and 20th-century Chinese politics. In China the Taiping Civil War is considered the defining event of the 19th-century.” The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, a Christian, who believed he was a brother of Jesus Christ and himself the second son of God. Had he been victorious China might be the world‘s largest Christian nation today.
Airlines are financial companies with airplanes and travel attached to them. The major carriers lose money of flight operations and make profits from the frequent flyer programs via credit card financing tie-ins.
Australia once went to war against emus (the birds, not some band of terrorists with a catchy name).
McDonald’s got its idea for the Happy Meal from then rival Burger Chef. The story and economic lessons are very interesting.
Credit card numbers obey a mathematical formula devised in the 1960s, the Luhn Algorithm, such that it can be determined instantly if a given combination of numbers is potentially valid for a credit card.
Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have the largest ratios of vacation homes to resident homes in the U.S., and they have been the leaders since at least the 1940s. This is not altogether too surprising once you think about it—though, still interesting.
We once accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Greenland, only three of which we actually recovered!
Rocky Mountain locust - Going extinct in 1902 their swarms were something of a biblical-type legend. The largest of which was “in 1875 estimated at 198,000 square miles (510,000 km2) in size (greater than the area of California), weighing 27.5 million tons and consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects [equivalent to 60 million bison], the greatest concentration of animals ever recorded.”
In the 1952 gubernatorial election in Texas Allan Shivers ran against himself as both the Democrat and Republican. He won 75 to 25 as the Democrat.
The 10,000-step guideline was simply a marketing strategy created in 1965 a Japanese company was selling pedometers. It has no scientific basis, per se, and can lead to negative health outcomes as it is excessive for many people.
“Ireland’s population are the most educated in the world — with 52.4% (1.8 million) of the population aged between 25-64 having a bachelor’s degree or higher.”
Mississippi has the lowest rate of homelessness in the nation.
“The Palace of Westminster is covered with tens of thousands of square meters of extraordinarily ingenious and coherent ornament. This is not because Victorian London was awash with carver-sculptors of genius. It is because virtually every detail of the enormous building, down to the last molding profile, was designed by one man, the strange and brilliant Augustus Pugin. Pugin carved nothing, but he produced an immense flood of drawings, which were executed in stone and wood by numberless other hands. Indirect carving made Pugin many thousands of times more productive than he could have been otherwise.”
With $7.8 billion in cash loaned interest free by customers in the form of prepaid and physical gift cards, Starbucks has more in customer deposits than 78% of FDIC insured banks.
John Locke invented the children’s toy blocks with letters on them. “It wasn’t until the late 17th century that philosopher John Locke helped popularize the idea that children should have toys to help them learn and bring them joy. He introduced the idea of alphabet blocks, ‘Locke’s Blocks’.”
Louis Pasteur did not experiment with milk. His advancement was later applied to milk by others.
The amazing power and promise of silk - “The stuff is stronger than a steel wire of equal thickness, stronger even than the Kevlar fibers found in bullet-resistant vests.”
Serpent Mound - Of unknown origin, it is now a National Historic Landmark in Ohio built by am ancient American Indian culture.
President McKinley had a large reversal in his position on tariffs as he entered his second term—a fact (unsurprisingly) left out of the Trump narrative.
The allusion, “May the Fourth Be With You”, often made every May 4th by Star Wars fans dates at least to 1979. “[O]n the day Margaret Thatcher was elected the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Her party took out a newspaper ad in the London Evening News that said ‘May the Fourth be with you, Maggie. Congratulations’.”
“Sears did not pioneer the mail order home. Other companies like Aladdin Homes sold homes through the mail for years before Sears did, and they continued to sell mail-order homes well into the 1980s, decades after Sears left the business.”
Upwards of 40% of the buildings currently in Manhattan could not legally be built today.
“[L]ions, hyenas, and leopards are all native to Europe but were eliminated from the continent by human activity in antiquity.”
In Russia male life expectancy at the age of 15 is only 54 years! This is worse than all but about a dozen of the world‘s poorest countries. Perhaps even more stunning, the combination of cardiovascular death rates and injury death rates in Russia are dramatically worse than basically everywhere else in the world.
The largest modern wind turbines have a significant negative effect on nearby home values reducing them by as much as 12%.
Mormon leaders surprising history - Joseph Smith ran for president and Brigham Young operated a commercial distillery in Salt Lake City.
“Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji.”
For basically the first time in it’s history, the U.S. is a net importer of food.
The shale gas boom that began in the mid 2000s reduced average annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions per capita by 7.5%.
Wildfire risk in Austin, TX - “Austin is currently the 5th most at risk city in the U.S. for number of homes imperiled by wildfire, and ranks #1 outside of California.”
The flute riff in “Down Under” by Men at Work was supposedly taken from a nursery rhyme, "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree", and the legal case of it contributed to the stressful, early end of flute player Greg Ham's life.
People on SNAP benefits, a.k.a. food stamps, cannot purchase hot or prepared foods with them. This stems from legislation in 1964 based on a paternalistic idea that banning it would encourage them to learn how to cook a nutritious dinner.
The U.S. Patent Office is the only official U.S. government building that was not burned by the British in the war of 1812. This was because of the efforts of the first superintendent of the Patent Office, William Thornton who also designed the Capitol building among other feats, who stood between the building and the British declaring they’d have to kill him first. He was basically making the case that this wasn’t a repository of government but rather of knowledge and ideas of individuals—a private property defense of it. The British agreed and moved on.
It is a myth that in the Nixon Kennedy debates radio listeners strongly favored Nixon and thought he won the debate while television viewers believe Kennedy won the debate. It is based on three very flimsy sources only one of which is an actual survey, and that one was anecdotal at best.
Differences in building design internationally isn’t generally cultural but regulatory in nature. “China builds apartments as ‘towers in a park’, whereas when Americans build apartments, they favor mid-rise 5-over-1s. Despite the height of Chinese towers, the two building forms achieve nearly identical densities, explains Alfred Twu. The reason they do things so differently isn’t cultural but regulatory. Culturally Chinese developers and apartment buyers in Taiwan, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong all prefer forms more similar to the American, and global, norm. But in China, building codes mandate apartment buildings to provide at least two hours of direct sunlight to their lowest floors on the coldest day of winter. A surprising number of urbanistic differences stem not from the cultural preferences of buyers but technical documents that can be changed with the stroke of a pen.”
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 term “late capitalism” is over 100 years old!
Infection by tooth worms were a very widely and long-held theory for tooth decay in early dentistry. And arsenic was one method used extensively to treat and help extract bad teeth.
The term “penny” in reference to nail size originates from the cost of nails with larger ones costing more.
Converse tennis shoes have a fuzzy felt on the bottom of them that quickly wears away solely (see what I did there?) to allow the shoe to qualify as a bedroom slipper rather than an outdoor shoe under U.S. trade rules. This allows it to have a lower tariff rate.
The phrase ‘Trust, but verify’ made popular by President Reagan comes originally from a Russian proverb.
From the founding and until the 1970s, it was nearly unanimously assumed that plea bargaining was unconstitutional. It began it’s acceptance simply as an attempt at convenient efficiency rather than justice.
In the late 1600s tobacco enemas were frequently used as a method to cure drowning. Unsurprisingly, it did not work. Surprisingly mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was thought of as vulgar and frowned upon. And I don’t even wanna talk about what leeches were used for!
Bonus things learned:
“Owens lake is the largest source of carcinogenic particulate air pollution in North America.”
The real and fuller story of Notre Dame's famous player Rudy.
As it relates to forest fires and wildfires, the human–induced change has been to significantly and dangerously reduce these fires. This change has dwarfed any human-caused changes in climate by an order of magnitude. We need a lot more (controlled) fires.
How ancient Venice created artificial water wells to collect fresh water, which helped it maintain its independence.
“Consumption of red wine in France has fallen by about 90 per cent since the 1970s”—down from very high levels to begin with. “With every generation in France we see the change. If the grandfather drank 300 litres of red wine per year, the father drinks 180 litres and the son, 30 litres…” This reminds me of how much alcohol was consumed by Americans before prohibition, as documented by Daniel Orkent in his masterpiece Last Call. And it also reminds me of the story in A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle of the workers on his house taking a break in the middle of the day to have what amounted to a big feast with lots of red wine consumed only to return to productive work all afternoon.
The crocodile Gustavo is very close to the worst human serial killers for who has had the most victims. I also learned how many victims the worst serial killers claimed, how many of the killers I had never heard of, and how many were from Latin America and the Soviet Union/Russia.
Hard stirrups for horse riders date back to around the 300s.
A key part of Texas’s amazing growth and economic development especially as it relates to housing policy is its MUDs (Municipal Utility District) model.
Pakistan has been one of the fastest adopters of solar power.
The electric age, the second industrial revolution, owes its existence to the legacy of Daniel C. Jackling. He pioneered the process of extracting copper, “the mineral underbelly upon which all modern technology rests,” in a way much more productive and efficient than anything before.
Bring on 2026!