52 things I learned in 2020
Previous years: 2019
1. Commercial and consumer toilet paper have different specifications and separate supply chains, which led to the early-pandemic shortages. The same is true of a wide range of perhaps surprising products, such as bananas: restaurants and cafeterias order smaller, loose bananas, whereas supermarkets order larger bananas in bunches. [Marker]
2. In 1989, Pepsi briefly became (on paper) the world’s sixth-largest military power. Russia had an arrangement with the company to trade vodka for cola, but when it ran out of vodka it offered the dispensable assets it had on hand instead — seventeen submarines, one cruiser, one frigate, and one destroyer (which Pepsi immediately sold). [Devin Sami]
3. For most of US history, when a sitting vice president died or replaced a president who died, no new vice president was appointed to replace him until the next presidential election cycle. This was the case until Spiro Agnew was removed in the 1970s (even Lyndon Johnson wasn’t replaced in 1963-64). Given the total amount of time in which we didn’t have a vice president (more than 37 years!) and the historical death rate of presidents through the 1960s (once every 23 years), it’s actually quite fortunate that we never had a president die without a VP to take over. [Wikipedia]
4. The term “Fallopian Tube” is actually a mistranslation of the Italian term “Fallopian Tuba” (tube is the plural of tuba in Italian), so named because the guy who “discovered” them thought they looked like tubas. [Wikipedia]
5. Solar power costs have fallen by about 80% in the last decade, much faster than the forecasted decline of about 20-30%. [Ramez Naam]
6. In 1999, a divorcing couple in Las Vegas couldn’t decide how to split up their Beanie Baby collection, so a judge ordered them to conduct a live draft in the courtroom. (Maple the Bear was the first overall pick.) [@thejasonkirk]
7. Frederick Douglass was the most photographed person of the 19th century, largely because he intentionally sought out opportunities to pose for photos so Blacks would be portrayed in a realistic light instead of in (often distorted) drawings. [The Alignment Problem]
8. Deaths caused by pathogens in the US were increasing well before Covid-19, rising by 60% from 1980-2000. HIV was the biggest factor, but even excluding HIV there was a 22% increase. [Pandemic]
9. The Seinfeld theme was played on a keyboard, not a real bass, and it was re-recorded for every single episode to optimally fit the timing of Jerry’s intro bit. [YouTube]
10. N95 masks don’t work like sieves, they work like spiderwebs attracting particles into their fibers. [YouTube]
11. MLB pitchers made significantly more pickoff attempts this year, plausibly because there was no crowd to boo them for wasting time. [Sam Miller]
12. Random vice presidential facts: Herbert Hoover’s VP, Charles Curtis, was 3/8 Native American. Woodrow Wilson’s VP, Thomas Marshall, had his office moved out of the White House for telling too many bad jokes. Martin Van Buren’s VP, Richard Johnson, had an openly recognized relationship and two children with one of his slaves, and he was such an electoral burden that a) faithless electors refused to vote for him as VP, requiring him to be named via the Senate; and b) Van Buren dropped him from the ticket in 1840 and ran for his second term without a VP. [Wikipedia]
13. The average human body temperature has fallen by ~1°F since 1860 (to 97.5 degrees, not 98.6), perhaps because we experience less inflammation from diseases [Popular Mechanics]. And body temperature varies by ~1°F during the day, with lower temperatures in the morning and higher in the late afternoon and evening. [Wikipedia, inspired by personal experience]
14. Ben of Ben & Jerry’s has anosmia (no sense of smell) [Matt’s Thoughts In Between]
15. US automakers produced ~20% of US munitions during WWII (not only vehicles but also machine guns, aircraft engines, etc.). 10% came from General Motors alone, and Ford produced more war material than all of Italy. [Freedom’s Forge]
16. There is a place in New Jersey that’s farther south than a place in Washington DC. [@MattGlassman312]
17. In order to distribute the smallpox vaccine around the world in the 19th century, scientists passed it through a chain of sequentially vaccinated people, because there was no better way to store live vaccine at the time than inside humans. [Marginal Revolution]
18. Contrary to what cartoons say, you can’t actually be fully consumed by quicksand (your legs may sink, but your upper body is less dense than quicksand, so it will float). [Britannica]
19. The powerful, hard-to-manage, clangy radiators in old NYC apartments were installed in response to the Spanish Flu — they were intended to be powerful enough to keep the space warm even with the windows open in winter, so residents could get natural ventilation. [Bloomberg]
20. At least 38% of US traffic deaths occur on rural two-lane roads. [Peter Attia]
21. Europeans transmitted deadly diseases to Native Americas — and mostly not the other way around — because the worst diseases spilled over from domesticated animals, of which Native Americas had very few. [The Ages of Globalization]
22. Tuvalu, an island nation of about 11k, earns about 1/12th of its national incomefrom licensing its “.tv” domain. [Marginal Revolution]
23. Deep into the production of Toy Story 2, someone accidentally deleted nearly all files and Pixar’s normal backup system wasn’t working properly; the project was only saved because someone who had just returned from maternity leave and was working from home had an ad-hoc backup on their home computer. [Creativity Inc]
24. A UK hospital improved its surgical safety by visiting a Formula 1 pit crew, learning best practices for changing out a car mid-race, and applying them to the “handover” from surgery to the ICU. [@emollick]
25. No one really knows how eels reproduce and no one has been able to make it happen in a lab (threatening the future of the species). [The Economist]
26. As of the beginning of this year, only one of the Federal Reserve’s 406 economists was a black woman [Planet Money]
27. Europe didn’t know about fall of the Mongol empire until nearly a century later - Columbus was searching for them on his voyage [Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World]
28. Going through an anxiety-provoking experience is like a “mental vaccination” — you can get partial immunity for similar situations in the future because you remember that one and how it worked out. [The Paranoia Parameter]
29. In 1939, the US had only the 18th largest military in the world. [Freedom’s Forge]
30. Hall of Fame baseball player Monte Irvin originally went by Monty, but he changed his spelling after making the major leagues because when signing baseballs his “y” would run into other players’ signatures. [Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend]
31. Money and markets often first developed around armies — because currency allowed them to be paid far from their home, and as incentive to loot precious metals from conquered territories. [Debt: The First 5,000 Years]
32. Two people doing a checklist as a team are more robust to errors than going over it sequentially (e.g. one person does it and the other double-checks it), because the latter method lets each person feel that the other will avoid mistakes. [The Design of Everyday Things]
33. By some estimates, American real estate alone accounts for 20% of all global wealth. [Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World]
34. AI systems for object recognition are better at classifying objects found in high-income households than those found in low-income households. [ArXiV]
35. With no external cues to help them, people who are lost will naturally (accidentally) walk in circles, so they will not end up more than 100 meters from their starting position no matter how long they walk for. [WIRED]
36. The number of businesses in a city scales linearly with population: no matter its size, a city is likely to have roughly one business establishment per 22 residents on average (and eight employees per business). [Scale]
37. Dogs become moody and emotional during puberty just like humans. [The Guardian]
38. Part of the reason why US students perform worse on standardized tests than students in some countries is that they don’t really care — when offered monetary incentives for doing well, they improved significantly (whereas students in Shanghai didn’t the same with or without incentives). [AER]
39. From 2005-2019, the average age of new S&P 500 CEOs increased by 14 years — meaning the exact same generation continued to get the same opportunities even as it aged. [The Boomer Blockade]
40. In 1870, 87% of metro newspapers were partisan (before scale effects started kicking in within cities). [Why We’re Polarized]
41. In the 1940s BF Skinner trained pigeons to bowl and play a Pong-like game with a complicated system of rewards and reinforcement. This was a proof of concept for a larger project with the US military aiming to get pigeons to guide missiles to their targets. [The Alignment Problem]
42. 25%+ of all mammals are bats, part of why so many zoonotic diseases can be traced back to bats. [Spillover]
43. For scientific publications that are later cited in a patent filing, the average time lag from journal publication to patent filing is 17 years. [New Things Under the Sun]
44. According to one study, the actual “hurdle rates” (required rate of return) that businesses use when evaluating investments barely changed from 1985-2015, even though yields on corporate debt fell from ~10% to ~4% in that span. [Nathan Tankus]
45. Lower-income Americans are much less likely to drink alcohol than higher-income people. [Gallup]
46. If you give sea urchins tiny hats they’ll “wear” them as protection. [@valfrogkamen]
47. Humans have a “stereo” sense of smell (similar to hearing) — we can tell which direction a scent is coming from by sensing the differences between our nostrils. [PNAS]
48. Of the 5500-odd companies that are 200+ years old, more than 3,000 are Japanese. [FT Alphaville]
49. Willie Mays learned his famous basket catch from a fellow recruit in the army during the Korean War, after he was already an established big leaguer. [Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend]
50. The total length of all your blood vessels is 100,000km, enough to go more than twice around the earth. [Scale]
51. Blockbuster and Enron considered a partnership on streaming video in 2000, but they didn’t really commit and it ultimately failed around content revenue negotiations. [Seeing Around Corners]
52. Six teenage boys in Tonga were shipwrecked on a deserted island in 1966-67 and survived for 15 months before they were rescued — a real-life Lord of the Flies situation (but with less violence). [The Guardian]
Previous years: 2019
Also see my favorite tweets of 2020.