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52 things I learned in 2019

  1. Until 2011(!), vehicles were only required to use “average male”-proportioned crash test dummies; when female-like dummies were added, many cars’ safety ratings fell. [Invisible Women]
  2. “Going steady” was controversial in the ’40s and ’50s because (some) adults wanted their children to date more casually, as had been common in the ’20s and ’30s. Catholic schools in 1957 even expelled some students for “seeing one student to the exclusion of all the others.” [Labor of Love]
  3. A new, significantly less bitter cultivar of Brussels sprouts was introduced about a decade ago. [xkcd]
  4. The first silicon transistor company --- whose workers went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which in turn spawned many top tech companies --- was founded in the Bay Area mainly because the founder’s sick mother lived there. [The Code]
  5. The use of “meme” as it relates to internet culture was coined by Mike Godwin writing about the spread of Godwin’s Law in Wired. [Because Internet]
  6. The iPhone alone accounts for more than $10B of America’s trade deficit with China. However, traditional trade statistics are misleading here, because the majority of this is value added in other countries (Korea, Japan, etc.) before the product reaches China. [VoxEU]
  7. Per the 2010 census, more Americans trace their roots back to Germany than any other country. [Capitalism in America]
  8. Visa (then BankAmericard) was launched by just giving everyone in Fresno, CA a credit card, forcing merchants to get on board. The program lost $170M in today’s dollars in its first 15 months due to fraud and late payments, but became profitable and entrenched throughout California a few years later. [Mine Safety Disclosures]
  9. Chess players burn up to 6000 calories a day (losing ~2 pounds per day) during tournaments. [ESPN]
  10. Cloudflare uses lava lamps to reliably generate random numbers for security purposes. [Quartz] (Related: people are bad at making random sequences.)
  11. Only 1 in 10,000 eggs is estimated to be at risk of having salmonella, so go ahead and eat that raw cookie dough. [The Bad Food Bible]
  12. The oft-cited claim that women’s representation dramatically increased after orchestras switched to “blind” auditions is not really supported by any traceable evidence in the original paper. [Andrew Gelman]
  13. It is somewhat well-known that lifespan has become increasingly correlated with income --- however, this trend is completely explained by smoking, which has become more strongly (negatively) correlated with income [NY Fed]
  14. The world’s largest ETF (State Street’s S&P 500 ETF) is technically a trust held in the names of 11 random-ish Millennials. [Bloomberg]
  15. The “nickel fare” for the subway was a major populist force in NYC politics in the first half of the 20th century. Subway fares remained 5c from its opening in 1904 until 1948 despite 2.5—3x overall price inflation in that span, straining funding for operational improvements. [722 Miles]
  16. Digital cameras often store all photos in landscape orientation (even if all devices are smart enough to show them as vertical images), which can trip up computer vision models. [Medium]
  17. Many conventional financial metrics, like ROE and ROA, are systematically overstated in times of high inflation --- returns grow with inflation but depreciation of assets does not. [FT Alphaville]
  18. The introduction to the Three-Body Problem series is set in China’s Cultural Revolution (one of the things that hooked me into the book) --- but only in the translated English version; the original Chinese version opens elsewhere to diminish the role of politically sensitive parts. [NYT]
  19. Former football players die at a significantly higher rate than other pro athletes --- but contrary to the popular narrative, this is 9a) due to heart disease (perhaps a consequence of being overweight) rather than brain disease, and b) football players’ death rates are no higher than men’s in the general population. [Science Mag]
  20. At Harvard Business School, only 1.3% of the Class of 1941 went to Wall Street, and only 6% in the 1960s. 30% do now, more than any other sector. [American Affairs, The Meritocracy Trap]
  21. American academia was initially very focused on applied fields like agriculture: through 1897, only 56 Americans had earned math PhDs, and 73 in physics. [NBER]
  22. Google Images was created in response to a mass of users trying to search for photos of Jennifer Lopez wearing a green dress at the 2000 Grammys. [GQ]
  23. I’m suspicious of data that supports the prevailing narrative so thoroughly, but: when the average Boomer was 35 (in 1989), their cohort owned 21% of all US wealth. For Gen X (in 2008), that share was 8%; Millennials won’t reach that stage until 2023, but right now their share is only 3%. [@KBAndersen]
  24. Part of why rural areas are losing population is just tautological --- places that gain enough population by definition become classified as urban rather than rural. [WaPo]
  25. I consider this speculative but interesting: Girls tend to be perfectionists in school, whereas boys tend to do the minimum needed to succeed --- which may help them be more confident in their abilities and better learn how to calibrate effort in the long run [NYT]
  26. At his peak in 1999—2000, Tiger Woods beat the field’s average in 89 consecutive rounds; the next-best such streak in recorded history is 33 rounds. [Effectively Wild]
  27. About the same number of people worked on the 1933 and 1975 King Kong movies, but 15x more people worked on the 2005 edition --- likely reflecting the increased specialization and complexity of film work today. [How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World]
  28. The famous “37% rule” for optimal stopping problems relies on some non-trivial assumptions --- in particular, it only guarantees optimizing your chance of finding the very best outcome, not necessarily optimizing your average outcome. [Algorithms to Live By]
  29. China has been the leading publisher of AI research for years, but much of it has had a low impact as measured by citations --- but now China is approaching the US in highly cited AI publications as well. [WSJ]
  30. Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then they were acquitted --- on the logic that unanimity often indicates some sort of systemic error. [phys.org]
  31. Through 1967, more than half of integrated circuits produced in what would become Silicon Valley were purchased by the US military. [VC: An American History]
  32. The presidency of the Council of the European Union, which rotates between member countries every six months, always has a corporate sponsor. In 2019, Romania’s term was sponsored by American soft drink company Coca-Cola, and Finland’s term was sponsored by German automaker BMW. [The Independent]
  33. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” came about when Coca-Cola asked a producer who had worked on a Charles Schulz documentary to make a family-friendly Peanuts Christmas special, so that the company could sponsor it. [NYT]
  34. As much as 40% of global foreign direct investment is just financial engineering that passes through empty corporate shells with ‘no real business activities” [FT/IMF]
  35. Apple and Google had a literal “handshake deal” to put Google Maps in the first-gen iPhone, because the contractual details would take too long to sort out --- hard to imagine that happening today! [The One Device]
  36. For all the digital ink spilled by people like me on the importance of taking three-pointers and layups, there is almost no correlation between aggregate shot selection and overall team quality in college basketball. [Hoop Vision]
  37. By one estimate, the invention of air conditioning made Southern workers 24% more productive, helping the South develop significant economic centers again in the 20th century [Capitalism in America]
  38. Female board directors cluster in large metropolitan areas and tend to live much farther away from headquarters compared to their male counterparts. [Marginal Revolution]
  39. The voice actor for Siri read every word in the dictionary and didn’t know until later that it became Siri’s voice. She said she got bored during the recording, so Siri “may have an attitude” at times. [The One Device]
  40. On calls with investors in 2018, executives of public American companies mentioned Amazon more often than they mentioned any other company, public or private. They mentioned Amazon more than they mentioned President Trump --- and nearly as much as they mentioned taxes. [CB Insights]
  41. Our own brains have two competing systems --- one to create, one to inhibit or question the drive to create (e.g. a stroke survivor with the latter system damaged felt a compulsion to paint everywhere) --- roughly mirroring the structure of Generative Artificial Networks. [The Creativity Code]
  42. TGI Friday’s was born as one of the first singles bars in NYC (at 63rd and 1st), because single women were barred from many bars as late as the 1960s. [Labor of Love]
  43. Simple AI algorithms can learn through trial and error to use cooperative, collusive pricing strategies. [VoxEU]
  44. Of course, humans can also fight back: Uber and Lyft drivers coordinated with each other to artificially activate surge pricing at Reagan Airport. (You probably saw this earlier, but still including it because it’s maybe my favorite story of 2019.) [WJLA]
  45. The decentralization of power in US urban planning since days of Robert Moses, while directionally a good thing, has left many veto points that make new major infrastructure projects nearly impossible [The Atlantic]
  46. Most kitchen thermometers use an inch-long sensor, so they should only be used for roasts or very thick cuts of meat (knowledge I could’ve used a few years ago when cooking steaks for Valentine’s Day and wondering why the temperature never got above 100F, only to find them totally dry.) [On Food And Cooking]
  47. Local levels of income inequality in the US resemble those of the European countries that today’s people trace their ancestry to. [VoxEU]
  48. At least among students, North Americans are the biggest ‘bullshitters’, and not surprisingly men are more likely to bullshit than women [IZA]
  49. Working with machines rather than humans might change our own behavior accordingly --- for example, programmers may be stereotypically anal and pedantic because they work with computers and compilers, which need every character specified correctly down to the semicolon to operate properly. [Coders]
  50. In 1925 the NFL’s Chicago Cardinals paid some high school kids to impersonate professional players so that they would win in a blowout and improve their odds of making the championship game. [@JohnEzekowitz]
  51. The Squirrel Census counted 2,373 Eastern Gray Squirrels in Central Park as of October 2018 [Data Is Plural]
  52. Everything in this thread of people doing unique jobs expertly on TikTok. [@kkaitlynreedd]

Published Dec 31, 2019

Data scientist, writer, learner