What I Learned: 2025

Sure, let’s do one of these again.

1) The future’s finally here: China is launching a 10 megawatt test bed thorium reactor in the Gobi desert this year with a 5 year launch horizon. Thorium has long been one of my lesser hyperfixations (You should see the collection of various bookmarks), as it has the potential to provide massive amounts of power without the same safety concerns and waste disposal issues that standard nuclear reactors pose. I hope this is the kick in the ass America needs to get in the thorium game. via https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-thorium-molten-salt-reactor

2) If one staid scold in recruiting at Ford is less of an asshole to Morris Chang, the Taiwanese chipmaking giant TSMC might never exist. “(T)he Sylvania offer is $1 dollar a month higher than the Ford offer. Chang calls Ford and asks if they’ll match the offer. But the person he speaks to is rude and dismissive, refusing to negotiate at all, and Chang gets so angry that he decides to take the Sylvania offer instead.” Recruiting really is the most bizarre weak link in tech. It seems like the most solvable problem imaginable, but literally everyone is terrible at it. via https://www.construction-physics.com/p/morris-chang-and-the-origins-of-tsmc

3) In reading about poisons and their use in fiction from Charlie Stross’s blog, I learned the difference between absorption (when a thing is taken into the interior of another thing) and adsorption (when a thing is stuck to the surface of another thing, bundling them together but not one within another). I did not know there was a word for that! via https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/01/a-novelists-guide-to-poisoning.html

4) The large picture boards with cut out holes for faces (known to Wikipedia as a photo stand-in) were first patented by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in 1874, who is also the originator of the Dogs Playing Poker paintings.¹ via https://interconnected.org/home/2025/01/22/synchronicity

5) Humans breathe in a tidal pattern, in and out, in and out. Birds, however, “have a non-tidal respiratory system, with air flowing more like a running stream.” Just one long, continuous breath. Thanks to Robin Sloan’s Trespassers (https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/winter-reading/) newsletter for introducing me to that mind-melting fact. via https://birdfact.com/anatomy-and-physiology/respiratory-system

6) There are remarkable phonetic patterns in how animal sounds are made (cats’ meow, pigs’ oink, etc) are spoken across languages. On the other hand, you get the Arabic phonetic “xnziːr” which sounds like no pig’s vocalization I can picture. https://pudding.cool/2025/03/language/

7) While reading about his previous exploits manipulating the stock market to keep Piggly Wiggly afloat², I learned about Clarence Saunders’ invention, the Keedoozle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keedoozle), which is a sort of grocery store crossed with an automat. They actually opened three of them in Memphis, Tennessee, which failed in essence because they were too successful (and their mechanisms broke down).

8) I was already aware of knocker-uppers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up), people who acted as human alarm clocks by knocking on windows to wake those inside in the morning, but I was not aware of the development of time as a subscription service.³ In the mid-19th century, it was difficult to know exactly what time it was because clock quality varied. As a result, there was a call for someone with a very accurate watch to walk around and synchronize time with people’s personal clocks. The Belville family was in this business in London right up until 1940! https://eehe.org.uk/72742/ruth-belville-she-sold-time/

9) In Dan Davies’ Lying for Money (https://www.amazon.com/Lying-Money-Legendary-Frauds-Workings/dp/1781259666/), which was recommended to me via Patrick McKenzie’s repeated references and which I recommend to anyone looking to learn more about the ins and outs and evolutions of fraud, aside from the fact that people are infinitely creative when desperate and morally bankrupt, I learned about the pyramid scheme ‘Women Empowering Women’, which was one of the few frauds where the original perpetrator got away with it. I remember living through high times for pyramid schemes in the 90s and 00s and in the current environment of desperation, wildly available reach, and flexible morality, I highly suspect we’re going to see a rise in pyramid schemes in the next several years.

10) Hidalgos, members of Spanish (or Portuguese) nobility akin to unlanded knights, were created for a number of reasons, including the “Hidalgo de bragueta” or “fly-of-the-trousers hidalgo” who “obtained tax exemption for having seven sons in lawful wedlock.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidalgo_(nobility)

11) From Dan Lewis via Hank and John Green’s newsletter, We’re Here (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/p/baby-giraffes-and-medieval-mattresses), I learned that firepoles were first invented and used because of curiously hungry horses. Which led horses to walk upstairs and not be able to get back downstairs again. Which led firehouses to install circular staircases. Which are hard to get down quickly in the event of a fire. Which led to experimenting with sliding down wooden hay baling poles from the upper stories, which led to faster fire response times. The causal chains of reality are myriad and amazing. ⁴

12) In the First World War, female telephone operators placed in the Signal Corps were some of the first women to serve in forward operating positions in the US Army, including at times in the trenches themselves. The initial thirty-three women of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, led by Grace Barker, were so effective that General Pershing brought on hundreds more, receiving thousands of applicants. And yet, because of Army regulations and legal rulings, while they were issued uniforms and took commands, they were never recognized during the wartime period as members of the US Army. “They were discharged as civilians—or rather, they were not discharged at all. Because of the Army’s legal determination, the women received no Army papers and were deemed ineligible for veteran’s benefits or even to receive the Victory Medal which the Signal Corps had promised them.” https://computer.rip/2024-12-04-operators-on-the-front.html

13) Joseph Neubauer was a German apothecary from a notable lineage of apothecaries. His father, in order to speedily send pharmaceuticals over long distances to needy patients, utilized carrier pigeons, who, wearing tiny backpacks, delivered prescriptions from doctors and returned with medications in the nearby towns around his shop. Joseph’s innovation was to, instead of backpacks, strap tiny cameras of his own design to the pigeons, thus inventing aerial photography. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/julius-neubronner-and-his-flying-photographers/uQXBawGRQxy5LQ

14) Via a fun list in itself of 28 bits about writing ( https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing ), “Apparently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle considered his Sherlock Holmes stories “a lower stratum of literary achievement” and thought his novels were far better.”

15) The Green Boys, in their newsletter We’re Here, pointed me to a newer tradition: the Giant Pencil Sharpening (https://www.instagram.com/p/DIerWZ2sqGo/). Apparently a guy in Minneapolis had a chainsaw sculptor turn an old beat up tree in his front yard into a giant #2 pencil, which dulls throughout the year from weathering. And so, once a year, he throws a party and sharpens it with a giant pencil sharpener. Let it not be known that people can’t find joy anywhere.

16) Russia utilized Brazil to establish cover identities for spies, taking advantage of lax rules around rural birth registrations, before sending them to western democracies including the US. It might have continued to go unrecognized, except Russia invaded Ukraine and got everyone’s hackles raised to root out Russian infiltration. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/world/americas/russia-brazil-spies-deep-cover.html?unlocked_article_code=1.I08.iFR6.LmtatbWc3R2b

17) Oscar the Grouch is orange. Yes, I know he looks green, however as shared by Alex Schmidt (https://www.tiktok.com/@alexschmidty/video/7505112381719186730), he is actually just covered in swamp muck over his orange fur, which he has not cleaned off in decades.

18) Not so much a thing I learned but a thing I relearn continually through exposure. (https://warrenellis.ltd/work/decide-you-dont-know-its-impossible/) Here’s a quote from Orson Welles when talking about doing things no one else was in filmmaking: “I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do.” Later the interviewer asks “Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?” to which he responds “A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible.” There’s a koan from Shunryu Suzuki I keep on a Post-It on my work monitors that reminds me of a similar notion: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” It’s important to learn and to find better ways to do things, but don’t lose that useful naivety of the beginner, for whom nothing is yet impossible.

19) Via OpenCulture (https://www.openculture.com/2025/05/a-young-jim-henson-teaches-you-how-to-make-puppets-with-socks.html) I learned how to make a Muppet! This video from Iowa PBS of a young Jim Henson, just before Sesame Street took off, showing how to make puppets out of household items. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC440k6iByA) (One of my personal skills is the ability to do a fairly good Kermit impression. I wish it had more use than it has to date.)

20) Rodger Sherman’s excellent Substack filled in the details on a remarkable story from college baseball: the first team in history to have an undefeated season. The LSU-Shreveport Pilots went 59-0, with a team .493 on-base percentage. My favorite fact is that their best player was named Josh Gibson, who hit .439 and stole 53 bases in 59 games. (https://rodgersherman.substack.com/p/a-college-baseball-team-won-every)

21) In 1846, the town of Ixonia, WI (between Milwaukee and Madison along I-94) was named by having a child pull letters at random until they had a long enough word that would serve as the name of a town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixonia,_Wisconsin

22) Via Interconnected (https://interconnected.org/home/2025/07/04/filtered), I learned that Pilates was devloped by a German man named Joe Pilates after observing the movements of cats while interned on the Isle of Man during the First World War. (https://www.transceltic.com/manx/surprising-link-between-pilates-physical-fitness-method-and-manx-cats)

23) As the forever war in Ukraine continues, life goes on as well, with some adjustments. Like holding the opera underground. (https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/resistance-in-ukraine-the-show-must-go-on-underground-in-the-kharkiv-opera-house-a-046d8e01-c14e-49fd-9bca-f6d531b4681a) via a neat and relatable newsletter I found this year, “The Curious About Everything Newsletter” (https://jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/fifty-one)

24) As an outside amateur interested in agrovoltaics (the commingling of agriculture and solar on the same land) I’d been aware of the benefits of the provided shade on certain plants’ growth cycles. What I was less aware of is that the plants benefit the solar panels as well, reducing temperatures and increasing panel performance in very hot climates. (https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/in-the-southwest-solar-panels-in-can-help-both-photovoltaics-and-crops/)

25) The record for the longest continual crewed flight is 64 days, 22 hours, and 19 minutes, by a two-person crew in a Cessna 172, from December to February of 1959, as a publicity stunt for a Las Vegas casino, the Hacienda. The plane was refueled twice a day by pumping fuel through a trailing hose up from a truck driving below it, which also supplied food from the hotel’s kitchen to the crew to eat, cut into pieces small enough to fit in Thermos jugs. You can even see the plane itself, hanging above the baggage claim at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. (https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2008/march/pilot/endurance-test-circa-1958)

26) The boycott comes from an actual Boycott, an English landlord whose detestable behavior against 11 Irish tenants led his employees and an entire town to go on strike against him, denying him service and shunning him. (https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/irish-invented-boycott)

27) The US does have universal healthcare, but specific to kidneys. From https://www.experimental-history.com/p/revenge-of-the-blockheads I learned that in 1972 anyone with end-stage renal disease was put onto Medicare, providing dialysis treatments to over 550,000 Americans this year.

28) From the same article (Experimental History was probably my favorite new find this year) is that someone actually went and made a tech tree ala Civilization: https://www.historicaltechtree.com. It literally starts at rocks in 3300000 BCE and moves to the modern age.

29) The football huddle was invented in 1894 at Gallaudet University (a prestigious university serving the deaf community) when they were concerned their hand signals were giving away their strategy to their opponents. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/deaf-quarterback-changed-sports-forever-inventing-huddle-180987178/)

30) In 1672, the Dutch not only killed their Prime Minister and his brother, but strung them up, desecrated their corpses, and ate portions of their livers. There’s political violence and then there’s political cannibalism. (https://www.historydefined.net/when-the-dutch-murdered-and-ate-their-own-prime-minister/)

31) Walter White would likely not have cooked meth if the show were made in 2025. He cancer became affordably survivable. (https://www.alexkesin.com/p/would-walter-white-still-cook-meth)

32) During an incredible week in Tokyo, I toured an exhibit of the Hokusai Manga, which are essentially drawing manuals first printed in 1814 containing the artistic stylings and direction of the titular artist. (https://hokusai2025.jp/en/)

33) In the same exhibit, I learned just how directly Hokusai’s art and ukiyo-e printing, influenced the Impressionist artistic movement. Hokusai’s work was referenced or directly copied by, among others, Bracquemond, Gallé, Manet, and Degas.

34) In the first episode of the new The American Revolution from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt on PBS, came the quote “A map is a statement. An argument.” Which bent my brain a little.

35) A year in which I get a new job on the other side of the country, as well as everything else happening, is not incredibly conducive to a long-running personal project like remembering to document 50 things I learned. Here’s to doing better next year!

Notes:

1
Also as noted in the Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_stand-in , they may have been inspired by sarcophagi in Cairo with a face whole cut out, shown here (https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/egyptian-photographer/archduke-franz-ferdinand-of-austria-posing-as-a-mummy-while-in-cairo-1894-photo/photograph/asset/6425719) being used by Archduke Franz Ferdinand!
2
In Lying for Money, https://www.amazon.com/Lying-Money-Legendary-Frauds-Workings/dp/1781259666/
3
TaaS?
4
This is also why I love Connections from James Burke.

What I Learned: 2025

Notes:

Share this: