52 things I learned in 2022
Previous years: 2021, 2020, 2019
1. In the 1980s, 75% of airline accidents happened while the captain (the more senior of the two pilots) was flying the plane. An investigation found this happened because (junior) first officers didn’t feel comfortable pointing out concerns when a superior was in charge; after airlines adopted a protocol with explicit steps on how to raise and confirm acknowledgement of an issue, captains’ share of accidents fell back to 50%. [Meltdown]
2. When Amazon first launched, you could technically order a negative quantity of books and pay negative dollars (meaning they would give you money). [WSJ]
3. Why do the flags of Bangladesh and Palau have a circle that’s slightly to the left of center? The loose end of a flag tends to fold up a little when it’s flying, so the off-center version actually looks centered when hung on a flagpole. (Exercise for the reader: at what point in time will emoji flags be seen by more people than physical ones, and how long after that will the circles get re-centered?) [Wikipedia]
4. It is physically impossible to exceed the 70lb weight limit of a USPS small flat rate box: if you filled one to capacity with the densest element on Earth, it would only weigh about 60 pounds. [@PaulMSherman]
5. Everything is economic policy: the popular (though misguided) belief that eating eggs is bad for your cholesterol may date to the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson directed the Surgeon General to publicize that theory in an attempt to control rising inflation by reducing demand for eggs. [Tracy Alloway]
6. In Game 2 of the World Series, umpire Pat Hoberg called a “perfect game”: not a single one of his ball or strike calls was contradicted by pitch-tracking data. This was the first time an umpire achieved that in eight seasons of tracking (roughly 14,000 games). [@UmpScorecards]
7. Why do the Nobel Prizes exist? When Alfred Nobel’s brother’s death was mistakenly reported as his own, he didn’t like how his obituary only focused on his arms trading business, so he changed his will to endow the prizes as a better legacy. [The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power]
8. Instead of the “Boomer Blockade” that afflicts politics and business, Hollywood has a Gen-X blockade: the average age of lead actors in popular films rose from ~35 in 2000 to ~50 in 2020. [The Ringer]
9. “Schrödinger’s cat” was a thought exercise intended to disprove a theory of quantum mechanics — if the theory leads to such a ridiculous scenario, it must not be true. Others agreed with Schrödinger that it was ridiculous, but they disagreed that it must be untrue, so even though Schrödinger hated that theory, he’s now best known for an explanation of how it works. [When We Cease to Understand the World]
10. SimCity’s designers initially tried to replicate real cities to-scale, but they found it boring because parking lots took up too much space. [@DavidZipper]
11. A frequently cited stat claims that 17% of prime-age Americans who are at least seven feet tall play in the NBA. But this was calculated by counting NBA players by reported heights (which by convention include shoes) and all Americans by real heights (without shoes). Few NBA players are actually seven feet tall without shoes; if you adjust for that, the correct statistic is probably less than 5%. [reddit]
12. Christmas shopping tip: people tend to perceive a gift’s generosity by comparing it to what similar objects usually cost — they’ll feel more grateful for a $45 scarf than for a $55 coat. [LessWrong via Byrne Hobart]
13. Even if babies spend as much time with other caregivers (e.g. daycare) as with their parents, their development is much more strongly correlated with how their parents care for them than with what other caregivers do. [Cribsheet]
14. Though both American and European researchers contributed to the invention of the light bulb, the US was much faster to adopt electric lighting systems widely, while Europe was more cautious and regulated. This had some downsides — chaotic wiring systems could be deadly, and unconstrained neon advertising was ugly — but also upsides, not only for economic growth but for safety (electricity replaced flammable gas and brightened dark factories). [The Age of Edison]
15. Sit-ups are bad for your spine and don’t strengthen your core very effectively. [The Atlantic]
16. After the rollout of public libraries around the turn of the 20th century (largely funded by Andrew Carnegie), patents increased by ~10% in towns that got a library compared to similar ones that didn’t. [New Things Under the Sun]
17. Remember in the 2010s when every pop hit also had a random rap bridge? That happened because Billboard counted all versions of a song cumulatively in its chart rankings, so record labels realized they could game that system by releasing the original song, waiting until it plateaued in popularity, then dropping a new “remix version” to push its numbers higher. [Hit Parade]
18. Huddling in football was invented by a team of deaf players so they could sign plays to each other without the opponent seeing. [Now I Know]
19. In 2021, Peter Schubert attempted to set a world record by solving a 54,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. After working on it for several hours a day for more than four months, naturally, the final piece went missing. (The manufacturer eventually heard and sent him a replacement.) [The Puzzler]
20. Getting renters, auto, or even home insurance online these days is incredibly easy (I often think I’ve done something wrong because I can’t believe anybody would actually insure me for this much without talking to me in person). But life insurance can be completely the opposite — my experience involved doing an in-person physical, getting access to detailed medical records, and sometimes doing follow-ups, a process that can take up to several months — so don’t put it off until you absolutely need it. [personal experience]
21. In 1900, railroads accounted for ~2/3 of US market cap. (For comparison, at the 2021 market peak, even the broadest definition of “tech companies” accounted for 40-45% of the S&P 500 market cap.) [Yahoo Finance via Byrne Hobart]
22. Want to guess the Wordle on the first try? Someone built an algorithm that looks at everyone’s Wordle tweets (which reveal only the outcomes of your guesses, not the words) and identifying the answer that would most likely generate those patterns, based on the most commonly used English words — it’s right well over half the time. [Wordle 1/6]
23. At least one NFL team has detailed scouting reports on every referee that includes how fit they are and who trains them, so the team can predict how quickly they’ll get ready for the next play. [Defector]
24. At the start of 2020 — the year it developed the world-changing Covid-19 vaccine that it marketed with Pfizer — only ~1% of BioNTech’s ~1000 employees were working on infectious diseases (most of the company was focused on cancer research), and it had never actually brought a product to market in its 12-year history. [The Vaccine]
25. Even if you have a model that predicts future market movements better than chance, you might lose money trading on it — if other people see some of the same signals, they might also try to make the same trade when you’re right (so you can’t always do it), but not when you’re wrong. [The Laws of Trading]
26. During the McGwire-Sosa home run chase In 1998, an IRS spokesperson said that if someone caught a record-setting baseball and gave it back to the batter, they would owe the IRS a “gift tax” that would have likely amounted to at least six figures. The IRS later walked that back in a press release, saying the gift tax would be waived; however, if someone catches such a ball and keeps it, it’s still ambiguous today how it would be taxed. [Bloomberg via Effectively Wild]
27. Most emoji scissors wouldn’t actually close far enough to cut anything. [wh0]
28. Stuck with a non-transferrable plane ticket that you can’t use? One person reportedly got around this by calling the airline, saying “oops, I misspelled my name, can you change this letter to that one”, and repeating the process for every letter of their name until it said a friend’s name instead. [@danluu]
29. Some competitive speed-typists use alternate fingerings for certain letter combinations — for example, although they might use their middle finger to type “e” or “d” in isolation, they’ll use the index finger on the latter when typing “ed”, because having the same finger hop from one key to another wastes time. This makes a lot of sense in theory (as an analogy, when learning to play piano I was taught to move my hands across the keyboard to play sequences of notes with different fingers, not to keep the same fingers on the same keys all the time) — but I practiced that “ed” combination on and off for a month and was still much slower than usual, probably because the standard way is too ingrained in my muscle memory. [MonkeyType forums]
30. The University of Oxford is older than the Aztec civilization. [RealClearScience]
31. In 1998-2008, the top 1% of global earners famously had the fastest income growth (with both the very poorest people worldwide and middle classes of developed countries falling behind). But new data shows that in 2008-18 that pattern disappeared: the top 1% experienced the slowest growth, and incomes grew faster almost uniformly as you go down the income spectrum (in other words, global income inequality fell significantly in that decade). [@BrankoMilan]
32. It’s possible for an NFL team to throw two forward passes on one play — the second pass is ordinarily nullified by a penalty, but if the outcome is better for the defense, they can choose to decline the penalty and let the pass stand instead. (Naturally, Tom Brady has done this already.) [NFL stat guide]
33. Google’s “emotion recognition” dataset — sentences paired with labels like “joy”, “sadness” or “neutral” used to train natural language processing models — is wrong about 30% of the time, according to one study. They posit this is because the (outsourced) human labelers didn’t have enough context and didn’t understand modern American usage of phrases — for example, they labeled LETS FUCKING GOOOOO as “angry” rather than something more appropriate like “excited.” [Surge AI, not exactly an impartial source, but the analysis and explanation seem credible]
34. Pop Rocks were invented when a brainstorming session to come up with crazy ideas resulted in “talking candy.” Scientists in the room realized that they knew of a way to sort of make that happen, and the rest was history. [See Solve Scale]
35. Historically, Saudi Arabia has stood out from other OPEC countries by generally pushing to produce more oil to keep prices low. This may be because it has more oil reserves, so it’s more concerned about long-term factors — keeping prices low reduces profits in the short term, but it makes it more likely in the long run that importers will keep using oil instead of shifting to other sources of energy. [The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power]
36. “Male” and “female” come from totally different root words and it’s a coincidence that they look the same. (Also true for “pen” and “pencil”, and “house” and “penthouse”.) [The Week]
37. Rubik’s Cube initially marketed its product as having “over 3 billion combinations.” The actual number is 43 quintillion — 10000000000 times higher! — but they figured people wouldn’t even understand what such a big number meant, so they rounded way down. [The Puzzler]
38. Amazon’s Kindle project was directly inspired by iTunes; digital music eroded the company’s business in selling CDs, and it didn’t want the same to happen in books. (Related: as of 2016, e-books accounted for more than half of romance novel sales, 30-45% for other fiction, 10-30% for nonfiction, and only 5% for kids’ books.) [Book Wars]
39. Nature, generally regarded as the most prestigious scientific journal today, hasn’t been that way for very long — it wasn’t peer-reviewed until the 1970s, and in the first ranking of journals by “impact factor” around that time it placed 109th. [Astral Codex Ten]
40. Most home economics programs in the early 20th century required several biology and chemistry courses, but not other sciences such as physics, perhaps contributing to modern gender ratio differences across fields. [Home Economics and women’s gateway to science]
41. History is surprisingly contingent: Marvin Miller, whose aggressive negotiation for the MLB Players’ Association paved the way for free agency and an explosion in salaries across sports, wasn’t the players’ first choice when he was hired in 1966 — they offered the job to the incumbent part-time head Robert Cannon, who wanted to take a much softer stance, but Cannon rejected it because he didn’t want to move to New York or Chicago. [Baseball’s Power Shift]
42. You may know sea otters as the animals that adorably hold hands while sleeping, but they have a dark side: female otters’ lives are pretty much a constant cycle of being forcibly impregnated, giving birth, and nurturing the child that repeats until they die of exhaustion. [Ologies podcast]
43. As early as the 1960s-70s, IBM had parallel career ladders for management and technical non-management roles that were equal in seniority and compensation, as is common in basically all tech companies today. [The Mythical Man-Month]
44. The placebo effect has gotten stronger over time when studied in Americans, but not in other countries. [Samstack] (An earlier favorite fact: people feel better after taking more expensive placebos.)
45. Chinese mobile phone users receive an average of nearly 100 push notifications per day, because apps there are especially intrusive and even harass you if you turn notifications off (which sounds like my personal hell). [Sixth Tone]
46. Every technology has its backlash: In 1885 some Yale students chopped down the first electric light pole on campus because they believed it ruined their privacy when going on dates in the park. [The Age of Edison]
47. A large-scale study of consumer goods found that the “pink tax” seems to be a myth — women’s products are more expensive for some goods and men’s products for others, but there’s not much aggregate difference. [SSRN paper] (However, women do seem to pay more in import tariffs, because those fall disproportionately on clothing, and women buy more clothing and their clothing tends to come from higher-tariff countries.)
48. One of the first Indians of Dalit (untouchable) caste to break social barriers was Palwankar Baloo, the nation’s best bowler at a time when it was beginning to play cricket internationally. [A Corner of a Foreign Field]
49. Babies learn to sleep well at night before they learn to nap well, and even for naps they’ll begin by napping well in the morning before they nap well later in the day. [Taking Cara Babies]
50. Shrimp were a luxury food (more expensive than steak) until the 1980s. That was when scientists figured out that factory farming was made possible by “eyestalk ablation,” a nice euphemism for cutting off at least one eyeball, which weirdly increases females’ reproductive activity. [The Secret Life of Groceries]
51. Key changes occurred in 20-30% of #1 pop songs in the second half of the 20th century; today they’ve almost completely disappeared. [Tedium]
52. If a poem is rewritten so that it appears as prose, then people mostly will not even notice that it rhymes. This may sound like an odd topic to study that someone chose, but trust me when I say that you should read this piece sometime. [The perception of rhythm in language]