At the start of the year I resolved to keep a sort of diary of things I learned this year.1Heavily inspired by Tom Whitwell’s yearly lists. I read a lot online and I thought it’d be worthwhile to record the things that surprised, challenged, taught, and awed me throughout the year. So, here’s that list, of articles, videos, essays, comics, and more that I learned a little something from throughout the year:
Week of 1/1: Up until the micropipette was invented, scientists were forced to move liquids around with a device called the mouth pipette, which involved using suction from their own mouths to draw liquids into the tube. This was, as one could imagine, potentially dangerous depending on the liquid being moved and, regardless, not entirely hygienic. Frustrated with this device, Heinrich Schnitger took two days away from work and developed the micropipette, which included “a spring-loaded piston, second spring to shoot out residual liquid, and plastic tip.” via https://press.asimov.com/resources/making-the-micropipette
Week of 1/8: “loanword” is a calque (from German, Lehnwort). (calque: an expression adopted by one language from another in a more or less literally translated form.)
“calque” is a loanword (from French, meaning copy). via Timothy Burke on Bluesky
Week of 1/15: For much of history, writing about history was not a thing. The writing and collection of history among ancient civilizations was (according to our current knowledge and understanding) so uncommon outside Herodotus and Chinese historian Sima Qian that “[O]ur knowledge of ancient India relies more on ancient Greek historians than ancient Indian historians. Traditional Indic civilization simply did not have any.” Many extant works of Sanskrit make their way to modern times but none are histories. via https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/
Week of 1/22: When China was looking to learn about America after emerging from Mao’s rule under the reign of Deng Xioaping, it sent a young student to study the country and report back. Where did they send him to learn about the beating heart of America? Where did they seek the soul, the essence of an entire nation? Iowa City, Iowa.
To imagine what could have been if they had picked any number of other places to spend the first three months of this journey. A China that learned about America predominantly from Miami would have made for an interesting time in which to live. via https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/assistant-dictator-book-club-america
Week of 1/29: PDF standards cap the maximum size of a document at 381 square kilometers (or more accurately, an area of 15,000,000 inches). However, through careful manipulation, you can exceed that. Up to and past, oh, say, the size of the known universe. via https://alexwlchan.net/2024/big-pdf/
Week of 2/5: Zoning laws and architectural inertia led to the US manufacturing apartment buildings that generally stem off of a central hallway, meaning only one wall (excepting more expensive corner units) gets natural light and which doesn’t maximize floor space, driving up costs.2Unless of course you’re Charlie Munger’s vision, in which case you get no windows, to encourage you to go outside or something. Meanwhile in Europe, point access design, where multiple units flower off from a central stairwell or elevator (or both!) allow apartments to reclaim that length and build around 2-3 sides of the access point. via https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america
Week of 2/12: The British Major General Fuller invented the “blitzkrieg” tactic of armored assault before the Germans did, but didn’t possess the capacity for change because the existing institution was built around the existing status quo and it had became too well constructed and refined around achieve its existing goal to be able to achieve a new one. Which is an institutional concern around the capacity for evolution that seems to strike business and organizations throughout the world and throughout time. via https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/id1484511465?i=1000459474905
The other thing to note, however, is that Fuller, so frustrated by the British inability to adopt his innovation, turned to fascism and National Socialism, later becoming involved in a plot to foment a fascist coup. There’s a lesson there as well in the moral lengths people are willing to stretch to see their visions through. 3See also Gerald Bull and Project Babylon.
Week of 2/19: At current rates of inflation, both in general and specific to their pricing trends, a banana may cost $10 some time between the early 2100s to the mid-2200s. via https://xkcd.com/2892/
Week of 2/26: Mark Twain was not the only nom de plume Samuel Clemons adopted. Others include W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab (Sam Clemons’ first pen name as a printer’s apprentice), Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Sieur Louis de Conte, John Snook and even “Josh”. via https://www.connellguides.com/blogs/news/113163780-the-origin-of-mark-twain-s-name
Week of 3/4: Bit of an odd one, but that’s Randall Munroe’s entire remit, so… The largest issue with running a nuclear submarine in space would likely be dissipating heat, rather than any issues with handling pressure or air or etc. Without a medium to dissipate its generated waste heat into, the ship would cook very quickly. via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUBRd1O2dU
Week of 3/11: Just gonna quote this one directly rather than even try to find some more impactful way to phrase it: “The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.” via Ethan Mollick on Twitter – https://twitter.com/emollick/status/17665045877818781964I’m sure this won’t come into play later in the year for any reason…
Week of 3/18: Turning swords to plowshares always seemed a weird way to make a plow to me until I learned about the need, in the hard soils of northern Europe, to literally cut through the top soil before turning it with the plow. The instrument that accomplishes this is essentially a giant riving knife that a quality steel sword would have been a pretty reasonable substitute for. (Which I learned via James Burke’s still excellent Connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)#Series_1_(1978) )
Week of 3/25: Knowledge throughout Europe in the 1600s flowed through a vital nexus, Father Marin Mersenne. He was known as the Postbox of Europe and transmitted information between people all over the continent at a time when Catholicism was very interested in quelling differences of thought. via https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Mersenne/ (initially learned via Connections ep 3 (ibid))
Week of 4/1: I hate April Fool’s Day, mostly because too many people fail Scalzi’s Maxim. Something I learned that’s not nonsense: every year the Oakland Museum of California holds a massive rummage sale from late January through early March in a 96,000 sq ft warehouse, called the White Elephant Sale at which thousands of items are recycled to new owners and millions of dollars are raised for charity.
Week of 4/8: Bill Murray’s son is an assistant coach for the two-time NCAA Champion UConn Huskies? Just the latest example of feeling old as hell. via https://sports.yahoo.com/bill-murray-embraces-son-uconn-154229433.html
Week of 4/15: A three pack of NFL draft things I’ve suspected that were confirmed by actual academic researchers:
• The treasured No. 1 pick in the draft is actually the least valuable in the first round, according to the surplus value a team can create with each pick.
• Across all rounds, the probability that a player starts more games than the next player chosen at his position is just 53 percent.
• Teams generated a 174% return on trades by forgoing a pick this year for picks next year.
via https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5416007/2024/04/16/nfl-drafting-methods-insight-massey-thaler/
Week of 4/22: Marc Andreessen, with further proof of Gibson’s assertion that the exceedingly rich are no longer even remotely human, says about the underprivileged people of his Wisconsin home town: “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” It amazes me how those who benefited from public goods (as he did working at the land grant University of Illinois) so quickly decry the need to give back to the public good once they get theirs. I hope he gets his giant bullet-shaped head stuck in a stair railing and starves to death. via https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/
Week of 4/29: I mean, I think this is the week we ALL learned that Kendrick is not to be stepped to: https://youtu.be/T6eK-2OQtew
Week of 5/6: Via the internet’s preeminent storyteller, Jon Bois, I learned about the Reform Party, which is wild as shit. Here’s his appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out describing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWEbRO1mRKY
Week of 5/13: Dan Orlovsky (whose work on NFL Live doesn’t get nearly enough credit given the heavy hitters he’s up there with) went over a great breakdown of NFL cadences and how and why each are used, as they’re taught to quarterbacks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqcAST75HF0
Week of 5/20: Via Scope of Work, a favorite physical world investigatory newsletter, a deep dive on latex, which I learned is not produced only by rubber trees5Though they are to date the only source that was found to generate enough volume to be commercially viable to harvest., but occurs in 10% of plants on Earth, and that the milky-white substance from dandelions is natural latex which could (were one incredibly dedicated) be harvested to create rubber. via https://www.scopeofwork.net/on-latex/
Week of 5/27: If all humans disappeared, the last light would continue to glow for hundreds of years (presuming you count manmade Cesium-137 as a light source) via Randall Munroe’s excellent What If video series. 6Which itself is a companion to his awesome books.
Week of 6/3: In order to find the best spots to invade Europe, Allied command put out a covert request via the BBC for photographs and postcards of beaches from Norway to Spain. via https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48215675
Week of 6/10: Less something I learned and more something Terrence Howard learned7Though I suppose I did learn just how out there Terrence Howard really is.: the grace and force of a thorough dose of peer review, from Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uLi1I3G2N4
Week of 6/17: AI as currently publicly celebrated is a machine for generating bullshit. What’s worse, it’s actively lying about how it gathers the data it uses to create its bullshit. And then, when called on it, pirated Wired’s story about how it was pirating Wired and other sources. via https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-plagiarized-our-story-about-how-perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/
Week of 6/24: Supreme Court decisions are required by Rule 33(1)(B) to be written in some member of the Century typeface family, and are typically written in Century Schoolbook. via https://www.poynerspruill.com/thought-leadership/typography-for-appellate-lawyers-improving-appellate-briefs-through-better-fonts/
Week of 7/1: The word “delves” shows up 25 times more often in papers submitted to PubMed since 2024, a strong indication of AI being used to generate the text of scientific papers submitted there. via https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/07/the-telltale-words-that-could-identify-generative-ai-text/
Week of 7/8: This week I learned about Esteban, a slave brought to North America who was one of the first men to explore the continent.
“In 1527, an enslaved African man named Esteban reached North America as part of a Spanish expedition led by the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez. After stopping on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, Narváez and his men landed in present-day Florida to search for gold. They soon became enfeebled by disease, and many perished. Native Americans drove those who survived, including Esteban, to the coast, where they set sail for the Gulf of Mexico.
During the years that followed, Esteban explored present-day Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and northwestern Mexico. He learned several Indigenous languages and even served as an interpreter. Esteban was, in the words of biographer Dennis Herrick, ‘the first person from the Old World of Europe, Africa and Asia to travel across the North American continent and also explore the American Southwest in the 1500s.’ Although the circumstances of his death remain mysterious, he most likely perished in the Zuni village of Hawikku in New Mexico in 1539.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-forgotten-black-explorers-who-transformed-americans-understanding-of-the-wilderness-180984607/
Week of 7/15: I mean, I suppose we all learned that the Secret Service is nowhere near as competent as their reputation would lead one to believe. We also learned that disturbed young men with access to high powered rifles continue to be a scourge on the peace of our nation. And yet we continue to refuse to learn the resolve to do a damned thing about it.
Week of 7/22: Mongolian attendees of Nadaam (a traditional sporting event consisting of wrestling, archery, and horse racing events) scrape the sweat off winning horses for luck. Also, Spencer Hall continues to be a master of his craft. via https://channel-6.ghost.io/skies-like-a-god/
Week of 7/29: Venus, due to the presence of phosphine and ammonia (which could neutralize the acidity of its massively dense sulfuric acid atmosphere), could actually potentially harbor some form of life. via https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/29/science/venus-gases-phosphine-ammonia/index.html
Week of 8/5: The probability of accidentally typing the 105 characters of Hamlet in order on a standard keyboard is somewhere around 1 in 10164,345. There are approximately 1080 atoms in the universe. There are many infinities, and the infinity in which a monkey accidentally types any work of Shakespeare is among the largest. via https://defector.com/point-counterpoint-monkeys-typing-shakespeare?giftLink=bb60e7e61184ead5f82f90a50fcf3486
Week of 8/12: Contrition originally meant the act of grinding, pounding, or bruising things against each other. The concept of “acts of contrition” has a different feel given that origin. via https://www.feliciadavin.com/word-suitcase/ground-down
Week of 8/19: Via the screenwriter Zack Stentz on Twitter:
“Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family took a wagon to illegally settle in Indian territory when she was a child. Late in her life she flew on a jet to visit her daughter in Florida. The people who lived from the 1860s to 1950s saw a hell of a lot of change.”
https://x.com/MuseZack/status/1823951569567519024
Week of 8/26: The carat weight for precious stones is based off of the weight of a carob seed, which were thought to all weigh the same (though truthfully have as much weight variance as all other seed weight distributions). It was originally 1/1728 of a pound, but is now defined as 200mg. via https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTNnH83ku/
Week of 9/2: My vision of blue is greener than 57% of the population, dividing at Hue 173. To my eye, turquoise is a blue color (which, yeah). But it’s also at 68%. And 72%. Each time I retested, my dividing line moved. Which I suppose indicates that there’s some subjective truth to the results and that they might also be affected by whether I’d previously ranked something one way or the other. Still, an interesting effort, even if I have some notes about how they might better run a visual experiment. via https://ismy.blue
Week of 9/9: This week I learned that red wine is made by mashing and fermenting whole red grapes, while white wine is made by skinning and fermenting only the innards of either white or red grapes. The same process as red wine done to white grapes (mashing and fermenting the entire grape) is known as orange wine. via https://www.scopeofwork.net/2024-09-06/
Week of 9/16: Wounded Knee was an end result of an effort to hold control of the Senate in 1890 via the seat in South Dakota.
“In those days, state legislatures chose their state’s senators, and shortly after it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on that South Dakota seat, U.S. Army troops went to South Dakota to rally voters by putting down an “Indian uprising” in which no people had died and no property had been damaged. Fueled on false stories of “savages” who were attacking white settlers, the inexperienced soldiers were the ones who pulled the triggers to kill more than 250 Lakota on December 29, but the Wounded Knee Massacre started in Washington, D.C.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-13-2024
Week of 9/23: The concept of blue raspberry was confusing to me before learning this: “The flavor profile of raspberry was actually developed using ‘mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety.’” Additionally, the color plays heavily into what people taste. Artificial grape only tastes like grape to people if it is colored purple. via https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/article/what-is-blue-raspberry-flavor
Week of 9/30: Someone hacked together an Android device with 24/7 Shazam running on it to develop BopSpotter, which identifies the sounds that make up the musical diaspora of the neighborhood around the pole it lives on in the Mission in San Francisco.
Week of 10/7: It’s the return of Every Frame a Painting! Got to learn all about Billy Wilder and the parts that writing and direction each play in constructing the resulting product in filmmaking, including developing tension, stakes, and consequential actions that don’t just make a film move forward but propel an audience through a story.
Week of 10/14: While blue jeans were introduced to the world by Levi Strauss, “jeans” date back to 1567 and pants worn by Genoese sailors8Spelled genes, while “denim” is from the 1600s and describes a weave pattern that originated in Nîmes, France (being a contraction of serge de Nîmes) via https://cottonworks.com/en/topics/sourcing-manufacturing/denim/denim-history/
Week of 10/21: I stared at this on the screen for several minutes while it broke my brain: “Black holes, it turns out, are the densest possible containers of information. But how much information can they carry? Strangely, according to calculations in the 1970s by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking, the amount depends on their surface area — not their volume.” On their surface area, not their volume. HOW. via https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thought-experiments-that-fray-the-fabric-of-space-time-20240925/
Week of 10/28: In an effort to ward off evil spirits (and the evil eye in particular), “Pliny the Elder also notes (HN 28.4.7) that a fascinus (a phallus-shaped charm) was hung beneath the general’s chariot as an apotropaic9adj, supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck: apotropaic statues. device.” Meaning that the Romans, among their other contributions to our modern world, invented truck nuts. via https://acoup.blog/2024/11/01/referenda-ad-senatum-november-1-2024-ancient-weapons-lost-works-and-roman-spooky-stuff/
Week of 11/4: I mean fuck, what did I learn besides the fact that a majority of voting age Americans are either so lazy or so cruel as to throw in behind four more years of a now unchecked narcissist being puppeteers by a band of seething sociopaths? I suppose I also learned that the effect of that outcome was apparently felt psychically, because I woke up the moment it was being called by the AP, and later learned that many other people had the same experience. I don’t like acknowledging that there is something beyond what we can observe, but in the root of me, I know that there is. I suppose that’s a sort of faith.
Plus, I learned Liz has a plan: https://time.com/collection/time100-voices/7173801/elizabeth-warren-democrats-plan-after-2024-election/
Week of 11/11: Beyond the 6 suspects we’re classically familiar with, Clue has had a number of additional characters added including Mr. Slate-Grey, Lady Lavender, and the one that threw me for a loop in trying to solve a NYTimes puzzle, Dr. Orchid. via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cluedo_characters
Week of 11/18: The reason films have a disclaimer regarding similarity to real persons or events being entirely coincidental is down to a portrayal of the assassination of Rasputin leading his assassin (and his wife) to come off in a bad light. via https://slate.com/culture/2016/08/the-bizarre-true-story-behind-the-this-is-a-work-of-fiction-disclaimer.html
Week of 11/25: The Green Bean Casserole was originally created at a meal to honor the arrival of the Shah of Iran. via https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYry8rJg/
Week of 12/2: In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, they make Captain Crunch. That is not the interesting fact. Some forms of Captain Crunch cereal contain a different sort of crunchy bit called a crunchberry. This is also not the interesting fact. The interesting fact is that crunchberries are only made on certain days of the year, during which the town of Cedar Rapids has a sweet scent hanging in the air from their production.10Cedar Rapids, I also learned, is also sarcastically known as the City of Five Smells due to several pungent industries around town This period is also marked by a 5k race called The Crunch Berry Run Initially discovered via Neal Stephenson’s newsletter: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/capn-crunch-comes-from-cedar-rapids
Week of 12/9: Facebook, in the middle of a period of growth in 2012, published an internal primer on their company to help onboard new employees and foster culture among existing employees. It was a little red book. I’m not sure if the irony was intentional or not, but it’s at a minimum an amusing choice in color schemes. via https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook Designed by https://benbarry.com
Week of 12/16: Thanks to Jon Bois, I learned about the scourge of banana peels, which one would assume is merely a comic gag, but which are documented to have occurred 308 times and killed 21. One standout is William Lytle, whose story I will leave you to discover by watching the incredible story at the link, but who led to my jaw widening further and further in its recounting. Who knew how dangerous (radioactivity aside) bananas could be. via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8W5GCnqT_M
Week of 12/23: Gang nail plates, which are the rectangular plates you see at the joints of roof trusses, revolutionized roof construction by allowing wooden members to be attached securely without toenailing.11Nailing at an angle to attach boards together. Because of this, it allowed roofs to be constructed which don’t need center support walls and led to open floorplans and massive house sizes. All a result of trying to solve for roofs getting blown off in hurricanes in Florida. via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oIeLGkSCMA
Week of 12/30: I’m a devotee of A Christmas Story, watching it at least 4 times every year as it streams on TBS and TNT. And yet it was only this year I learned that the reason “The Old Man” receives a leg-shaped lamp is because12In the story “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art” from Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. the trivia contest he enters is sponsored by Nehi, a soda brand13Which in 1955 rebranded as RC Cola. The logo for Nehi? A pair of women’s legs wearing “knee-high” stockings. The lamp is corporate brand swag!
And that’s a wrap! Thanks for taking a journey with me through a year of reading, watching, listening, and learning. Though the internet can increasingly feel like a cesspit of attention-demanding sludge and misinformation, it is still filled with wonder if one knows where to look. Here’s to another year to come of emerging a little brighter, a little smarter, and a little more entertained at its end.
Notes:
- 1Heavily inspired by Tom Whitwell’s yearly lists.
- 2Unless of course you’re Charlie Munger’s vision, in which case you get no windows, to encourage you to go outside or something.
- 3See also Gerald Bull and Project Babylon.
- 4I’m sure this won’t come into play later in the year for any reason…
- 5Though they are to date the only source that was found to generate enough volume to be commercially viable to harvest.
- 6Which itself is a companion to his awesome books.
- 7Though I suppose I did learn just how out there Terrence Howard really is.
- 8Spelled genes
- 9adj, supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck: apotropaic statues.
- 10Cedar Rapids, I also learned, is also sarcastically known as the City of Five Smells due to several pungent industries around town
- 11Nailing at an angle to attach boards together.
- 12In the story “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art” from Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.
- 13Which in 1955 rebranded as RC Cola