52 things I learned in 2021
1. The number of licensed geriatrics doctors in the US fell by 25% from 1996-2010, even as the population aged. Generalists can provide elder care, of course, but at last one RCT showed that patients that see a geriatric specialist have better outcomes than those seeing a generalist. [Being Mortal]
2. Many of the key researchers of the atomic bomb were really young: Niels Bohr was in his 20s when he developed his atomic model of the atom, and Ernest Rutherford and Enrico Fermi were in their early 30s when they made their respective breakthrough findings on radioactivity; each received a Nobel Prize before turning 40. Leo Szliard filed his patent for the chain reaction that would be at the heart of the nuclear bomb when he was 35. In contrast, the average age of the 17 Nobelists in physics and chemistry over the last three years is over 70 (with the youngest being 52). And research opportunities are going to older and older scientists: in 1980 the majority of lead scientists getting grants funded by the NIH were younger than 40; today most are older than 50. [The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Nintil]
3. Even among pregnancies assessed to be healthy at six weeks, 10% eventually end in miscarriage. [Source: Expecting Better, and personal experience. Ours happened at nearly 10 weeks, at which point the miscarriage rate is in the low single digits. We later learned the cause was triploidy, where there is an extra full set of chromosomes.]
4. One out of every six members of the “top 1%” in the US is a doctor or dentist; only 1 in 20 works in tech. [Brookings]
5. 75% of tea’s caffeine is extracted into the water within 30 seconds of steeping — oversteeping makes the taste bitter but doesn’t really make it more caffeinated. [On Food and Cooking]
6. As of August, Puerto Rico had a higher vaccination rate than any US state. It’s since been narrowly surpassed by Vermont, but it’s still above everyone else. (Obligatory caveat that the quality of our people-vaccinated data is terrible, but I haven’t seen anything suggesting PR is specifically skewed.) [@ashishkjha]
7. A good bowling ball is not uniformly filled inside (even excluding the finger holes) — more mass is concentrated in the center so it spins faster, and it’s weighted asymmetrically so that the axis on which it spins is constantly changing, coating the ball evenly with oil from the lane. [YouTube, full video highly recommended]
8. There are only 25 blimps in the world. [@rex_woodbury]
9. Children are much less likely to have severe COVID-19 outcomes than adults — according to UK data, even unvaccinated children were at lower risk of death than vaccinated adults of any age. (This was in the time before children could be vaccinated so it was pre-Omicron and mostly pre-boosters, which both lowered the risk to adults, but I’d bet on it still being true today.) [David Wallace-Wells]
10. When Who Wants to be a Millionaire came to Russia, the “Ask the Audience” lifeline became useless because audiences gave the wrong answer out of spite. In France they were usually more cooperative, unless they thought the question was too easy and the contestant should have known it themselves. [@RobKHenderson]
11. The Chinese term for “penguin” can be translated to “business goose.” [Ologies podcast]
12. The verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure I grew up with is no longer standard in today’s pop songs — they’re instead built around one or multiple “hooks” within a wider variety of song structures. That’s not the first such transition; the verse-chorus form itself only became popular in the 1960s, supplanting the “AABA” form more popular in the jazz age. [Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding]
13. Western math (mainly from the Greeks) was developed around geometry, so it had no need for zero or negative numbers; Indian and later Arabic math was developed around algebra so zeroes and negatives were critical. Similarly, multiplication was considered one of the most advanced concepts in mathematics by the Romans (because multiplying with Roman numerals is really hard, unlike with the Arabic system when it’s really easy). [Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea; Alexey Guzey]
14. You almost certainly learned to draw butterflies and icebergs wrong. [Emily Damstra / @GlacialMeg]
15. NYC came within hours of declaring bankruptcy in 1975, and its fiscal problems were gradually solved only by cutting then-generous social services significantly. [Fear City]
16. The very efficient markets hypothesis: A RAND researcher contemporaneously discovered the highly classified secret that lithium was used to fuel the hydrogen bomb by studying the stock prices of metals manufacturers as the bomb was being constructed. (His report was confiscated and destroyed.) [Journal of Corporate Finance]
17. To radially cut an onion into equal-sized pieces, aim for a point about (60%*onion-radius) below the cutting surface. [@kenjilopezalt]
18. Backboards weren’t originally designed for players to bank shots off of — they were implemented to stop spectators in elevated seats from reaching over the hoop and disrupting the game. [Hang Up and Listen]
19. Heliocentrism was first postulated by Aristarchus in ancient Greece (200s BCE), well before it was popularized by Copernicus in the 1500s. [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]
20. The tallest mallard in the world is known as ‘Long Boi’, standing 3.5 feet high. [@DickKingSmith]
21. Domestic US airlines have had only one accident-related fatality in the last 12 years — mainly by going through flight data and finding safety lessons from every actual or potential mistake. (Technological improvements have also helped, but those have also been adopted internationally, where the safety record is improving but not as strong.) [WSJ]
22. The Dunning-Kruger effect is probably just a statistical illusion — you can replicate the same pattern from the original paper merely by assuming everyone’s belief in their capability is correct but there is some unpredictable luck/noise in how well they do on the task you give them. [McGill]
23. ‘Pakistan’ is an acronym (for Punjab, Afghan Border States, Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan). [@Noahpinion]
24. Historic milestones weren’t always so popular at the time, in two parts: Some French despised the look of the Eiffel Tower when it was first built, calling it the “metal asparagus.” And according to at least some polls, a narrow majority of Americans in the 1960s opposed the level of spending on the man-on-the-moon effort. [Seven Ages of Paris, The Atlantic]
25. The Yankees (still named the Highlanders at the time) were moved from Baltimore to New York to spite former manager John McGraw, who left the franchise midseason to join the New York Giants and took a few players with him. [Baseball’s Power Shift]
26. Sirens on emergency vehicles have little benefit — most studies show they save less than one minute, or at most three minutes, per trip — and they cause significant downsides, such as riskier driving by emergency responders, erratic driving by others, and hearing loss. [NYT] (Related: a 10-decibel increase in noise reduces cognitive function by 5%.)
27. People spend $400M per year on table saws, which cause $4B per year in injury damage. [Kottke]
28. In the US and many other countries, people’s self-reported happiness didn’t really fall during the pandemic. I’m always rather skeptical of happiness studies, but this does fit with other research on “hedonic adaptation” — most people quickly get used to whatever their circumstances are. [The Economist]
29. Nike was ahead of its time as a “move fast and break things” company in the 1970s — it focused on massive growth at the expense of cash and nearly failed several times; it often operated in contractual grey areas; and it had a fratty, inexperienced leadership team. [Shoe Dog]
30. The massive clouds of “smoke” surrounding a spaceship as it launches are actually steam — a massive amount of water is sent under the rocket at liftoff to absorb the sound waves and prevent them from breaking the rocket itself. [Now I Know]
31. “Pasta in tomato sauce” and “fried ice cream” were invented only a decade apart (though the latter was originally ice cream wrapped in fried dough, not itself fried). [Food Timeline]
32. In Oaxaca, December 23 is the “Night of the Radishes,” in which people make oversized sculptures out of carved radishes. [Wikipedia]
33. Controlling for SAT scores, admission rates to Ivy-plus schools are roughly constant across the bottom 90% of the income distribution but rise rapidly and continuously within the top 10%. [Opportunity Insights]
34. Most wasabi served in Japanese restaurants in the West isn’t actually wasabi but dyed horseradish powder. [On Food and Cooking]
35. Amazon found its famous “two-pizza team” structure was ineffective for non-product functions, and even for product teams it’s since relaxed the strict size constraint. [Working Backwards]
36. The longest border France has with any country is Brazil (via French Guiana). [@TrungTPhan]
37. According to Orson Welles, in the early days of cinemas, movies would be shown on loop and patrons would enter whenever they arrived at the theater, not necessarily at the start of the film (kind of like walking into one of those short films at a museum). [Kottke]
38. Mendel’s discovery of how genetic traits are inherited was barely noticed at the time and not popularized for nearly 50 years. [The Code Breaker]
39. The first “wearable computer” was developed by Ed Thorp and Claude Shannon in the 1960s to predict with better-than-chance accuracy the resting place of a roulette ball. [A Man for All Markets]
40. The share of US economic activity coming from the top five metropolitan areas was lower in 2018 than it was in 1969. This is mainly because population growth in those cities is stagnant, even as per-capita incomes continue to grow. [The Upshot]
41. We usually think of established experts as holding onto existing theories for too long and impeding progress (“science advances one funeral at a time”), but when a potential new finding in particle physics came out earlier this year, most quoted scientists were hoping the old paradigm would be proven wrong, basically because their research would be too boring otherwise. [Quanta]
42. Firehouse poles were implemented because curious horses (in the days before trucks) kept wandering up the stairs and couldn’t get back down. [Now I Know]
43. Baseballs travel farthest when hit 10 degrees to the pull side of centerfield, because that’s the angle that minimizes sidespin (thus minimizing air drag). [Alan Nathan]
44. Former NYC Parks Commissioner Henry Jordan Stern, an eccentric city official who was obsessed with animal themes in architecture, required all playgrounds renovated or built during his 15-year tenure to have at least one animal-themed play sculpture. [Brooklyn Paper]
45. Zebras are black with white stripes, not white with black stripes. [LiveScience]
46. There’s a recent study that makes the rounds on Twitter every few months purporting to show that people hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they’re willing to give themselves painful electric shocks to avoid it. But most participants actually reported that the thinking time was somewhat enjoyable, they were just too curious about what the shock would be like. [@JuliaGalef]
47. Older siblings have an average IQ 2.3 points higher than younger siblings. [The Extended Mind]
48. Three Musketeers was introduced in 1932 as a set that also included vanilla and strawberry bars, so the name actually made sense. [Learned League]
49. 16-digit credit card numbers are actually a 15-digit number plus a “check digit” — which is related to the other 15 digits with a complex formula such that it will not match if there is a typo in any one of them (allowing the number to be easily detected as invalid). [Tim Harford]
50. “Mayday” is just an Anglicized spelling of “m’aidez” (“help me” in French). [@katelynthomas]
51. Goaltending in basketball was legal until 1944, because nobody actually tried to do it until then. [Dragon Hoops]
52. A Finnish man with no formal training reportedly built a plane from scratch and flew it for nearly a hundred hours until it was confiscated for unlicensed flight — then did the same thing at least twice more throughout his life, with the same ending. [@itsmaggydude]