52 things I learned in 2018

This year was pretty great. Here are some of the more interesting things I learned:

1. Around 90% of infants lie with their heads facing right. (Gardner, et. al. 1976)
2. In the NBA, teams down by one at halftime are more likely to win. (Berger & Pope, 2011)
3. Neighbors of lottery winners are more likely than average to go bankrupt. (Bloomberg)
4. One moosepower is equivalent to 3.27 horsepower. In Disney’s Frozen, from the time Sven notices the wolves to the time he escapes them, he exerts approximately 5.1 Horsepower, which translates to approximately 1.55 moosepower. (Kody Lyng)
5. You ascend spiral stairs in a clockwise direction. This design dates back to medieval times. It’s a defense against attackers. A right-handed attacker would be holding their sword in their right hand, making him less mobile and agile than the defender facing down the stairs. (Wikipedia)
6. Wild almonds are poisonous. When eaten, they release cyanide. Eating too many will kill you. (Ladizinky, 1999)
7. On average, a piece of gossip gets passed on to 2.3 people—often people who are higher status than you. In this way, gossip functions as a check on the amount of power the people with the highest social status have in a group. (Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence)
8. Salmon sushi was introduced to Japan by the Norwegians in 1986. (Japan Times)
9. When Larry King interviewed people who held a higher social position than he did, he adjusted the pitch of his voice to theirs. When his guests held a lower social position, they adjusted the pitch of their voice to his. (Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)

10. There is approximately one business establishment for every 22 people in a city, regardless of the size of the city, each with an average of eight employees. These numbers hold constant regardless of how big or small the city is. (Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies)
11. A horse has a peak horsepower of 14.9 horsepower. (Wikipedia)
12. People think spinach has lots of iron. But it also has lots of oxalic acid, which binds iron. If you eat too much raw spinach, you’ll develop an iron deficiency. (Tim Ferriss)
13. Contrary to the beliefs of roughly 33% of Americans, Kansas is not the flattest state. In fact, it’s the 9th flattest state, and it’s one of only two Great Plains states to make the top ten (the other is North Dakota). The flattest state is actually Florida, the second flattest state is Illinois, and the least flattest is West Virginia. (Disruptive Geo)

14. As of 2016, the brand most predictive of having a high income is the Apple iPhone. In 2004 it was Land O’Lakes butter, and in 1992 it was Grey Poupon Dijon mustard. (Bertrand and Kamenica, 2018, via Tyler Cowen)
15. The average high school GPA of a representative sample of 700 millionaires in the United States is 2.9. (Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
16. Dinosaurs roamed the earth for a long time. Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus. (Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions)
17. Most American cities have far more parking than they need. Seattle has twice as many parking spaces as households, Philadelphia has four times as many, Des Moines has nineteen spots per household, and the town of Jackson, Wyoming (population 10,000ish) has a 27:1 ratio of parking spaces to households. (Vice)
18. A man with older brothers is more likely to be gay than a man without older brothers. Each additional older brother increases the probability of being gay by about one-third. (Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)
19. You are 44% more likely to die if you have surgery on a Friday (1.44% chance) compared to a Monday (1.00% chance). The likelihood of death jumps 82% compared to Monday if you have surgery on the weekend. (Dan Ariely)

20. March Madness is an inefficient way of identifying the best team. If the better team wins an individual game 70% of the time and winning the tournament requires winning six straight games, then the chances of the stronger team winning all six games is 0.70⁶, or roughly 12%. That means, on average, the tournament identifies the best team only once per decade. (Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
21. Contrary to popular belief, violent movies actually lead to a slight decline in violence, because, even though people who are likely to commit violent crimes enjoy watching violent movies, they don’t commit violent crimes while sitting in a movie theater. Over a decade, the violent movies led to the direct decline of roughly 1,000 assaults every weekend. (New York Times)
22. The value of a parking space in Los Angeles, including construction and land costs, is now over $31,000. (New York Times)
23. How do you escape a T.Rex.? Just outrun it. The maximum speed of a T.Rex. is 12 mph, while most humans run 10 to 15 mph on average. (BBC)
24. There are only two escalators in the state of Wyoming. (The Atlantic)
25. For nine hundred years, there was a persecuted and despised underclass in France called the Cagots, living in villages from the English channel to northwestern Spain. They were not allowed to enter buildings or churches via main entrances, they were served communion on a stick, they were not allowed to pay taxes or possess firearms. They were allowed to practice carpentry and ropemaking, but no other trades. As late as 1968, people were still mocked for being descended from Cagots. Nobody really knows where they came from or why they were so discriminated against. (Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography)
26. The price paid by the tooth fairy is roughly $4.00 per tooth. This price is rising roughly 10% per year, compared to a typical inflation rate of roughly 2% per year. (Planet Money)
27. Vikings weren’t the first Europeans to set foot in America. Two Scottish slaves who accompanied them were sent ashore first to make sure it was safe. After they survived a night on shore, the rest of the crew followed. (Wikipedia)
28. As late as 1939, the United States had a well-developed plan to invade Canada. In 1935, Congress went so far as to approve $57 million to update the plan and fund the construction “of three military airfields disguised as civilian airports on the Canadian border, which would be used to launch preemptive strikes against Canadian air forces and defenses.” (War Plan Red)
29. The phrase “rule of thumb” refers to an eighteenth century law that specified the maximum width of a rod a man could use to beat his wife without being prosecuted. [Update: this appears not to be true.] Worse, it took until 1892 for a state to criminalize wife beating, when Maryland passed a law making it illegal. (Richard E. Nisbett, Culture of Honor: The Psychology Of Violence In The South)
30. When women are ovulating, they are (unknowingly) much less likely to call their dads, and when their dads call them, they end the conversation more quickly. However, they’re more likely to call their moms, and the phone conversations last longer. (Martie Haselton, Hormonal)

31. The number of guitars per capita in the world has risen from 200 per million in 1962 to 11,000 per million in 2014. (Hans Rosling, Factfulness)
32. When hungry children are asked to draw a coin, the coins they draw are bigger than the coins drawn by children who aren’t hungry. In the same way, when you’re thirsty, a glass appears larger to you, and if you’ve been told gardening is fun, then gardening tools seem bigger, too. (Robert Trivers, Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life)
33. Roughly one-fifth of Europeans alive a millennium ago have no living descendants today. (Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived)
34. After people wash their hands, their views on immigration reform move politically to the left. (John Bargh, Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do)
35. The mutation that causes light skin (a variation in the SLC24A5 gene) in Northern Europeans happened only 5,800 years ago, and it took millenia to spread throughout the population. This is why when the Romans arrived in the British Isles, they reported that the Picts of Scotland had dark skin. (Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution)
36. Only 8 percent of patients about to undergo heart surgery are willing to pay $50 to learn the different death rates for the same surgery at other hospitals. (Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
37. When you share something with someone, they are 19 percent more likely to share with someone else. And that person is 7 percent more likely to share with yet another person. (Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence)
38. Pepperoni pizza is subject to more government regulation than plain cheese pizza. That’s because cheese pizzas are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while pepperoni pizzas—which have meat—are regulated by the Department of Agriculture. (Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany, Risk: A Very Short Introduction)
39. Inventing fire and learning how to cook food has given humans many physiological advantages over our primate cousins. Chimps can chew around 300 calories of food per hour, while humans can intake an average of 2,000-2,500 calories per hour or more. Chimps spend more than six hours per day chewing; if humans ate the same raw foods as chimps, we would be chewing 42% of the day, just over five hours. In fact, humans chew between 5 to 12% of each day, and that figure includes a 2 hour evening meal. (Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
40. The fake smile—the kind you do for a posed photograph—didn’t exist until the eighteenth century, when the upper classes could afford the services of dentists. (Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain)
41. People return to a maximum of 25 places during any given time period in their life: “People are constantly balancing their curiosity and laziness. We want to explore new places but also want to exploit old ones that we like. Think of a restaurant or a gym. In doing so we adopt and abandon places all the time. We found that this dynamic yields an unexpected result: We visit a constant, fixed number of places—and it’s not due to lack of time. We found evidence that this may be connected to other limits to our life, such as the number of active social interactions we can maintain in our life…” (Alessandretti et. al., 2018)
42. There are strict rules about conversation that cross all languages and cultural boundaries. Of all yes-or-no questions, 75% receive a “yes” and 25% receive a “no.” It takes about 150 milliseconds to respond with “yes,” or “no.” At 650 milliseconds the listener responds with “I don’t know,” and at 835 milliseconds, they’ll say “huh?” or the original speaker will repeat the question. Additionally, the words “uh” and “um” occur about once every 60 words (50 for men and 70 for women), and “uh” is followed by a 250 millisecond pause, while “um” is followed by 670 millisecond pause. (N. J. Enfield, How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation)

43. The surface area of human lungs is as big as a tennis court. (James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science)
44. The English and French despised each other for centuries. In the 1700s, both countries blamed the other for the invention of the condom, with “the English calling them ‘French letters’ and the French calling them ‘English overcoats.’” (Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe)
45. 86% of people in France have never traveled by airplane. (Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography)
46. Blood leaves the heart at 40 centimeters per seconds but slows to 1 millimeter per second by the time it reaches the capillaries. (Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies)
47. People spend roughly one hour each day traveling or commuting, regardless of city size or form of transportation. This is called Marchetti’s constant. Whenever faster forms of transportation have been invented—the domestication of horses, the invention of trains, cars, and then planes—people do not reduce the amount of time spent commuting, they simply commute farther. Walking speed is around 5 km per hour, so the maximum size of a walking city is roughly 20 square kilometers; there are no large ancient cities built prior to 1800 larger than this. As transportation has become faster, and transportation networks have expanded, the physical size of cities has expanded in direct proportion. When people spend less time commuting or work at home, they make up for in it other days, including by going on walks that last as long as the remaining time that would be allotted for commutes. Even people stuck within the confines of prison spend around an hour a day walking around. (Wikipedia)
48. During the World Cup, domestic abuse rates rise by 38% when England loses. (Chronicle)
49. According to Geoffrey West, a physicist who studies scaling properties, “The half-life of a publicly traded company is 10.5 years, meaning that half of all companies that began trading in any given year have disappeared in 10.5 years.” (Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies)
50. People in Madagascar trace half of their ancestry to East Africa, just a few hundred miles across the Mozambique Channel. But they trace the other half of their ancestry thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean to a small village in Borneo. (Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity)

51. The word “okay” originated in Boston in the 1830s when it was popular to abbreviate phrases using the first letters of each word, such as “KC” for “knuff ced” (enough said) and “OW” for “oll wright” (all right). Only one survived: “OK” for “oll korrect.” (Martin Van Buren used the phrase in his 1840 campaign.) (Vox)
52. You can say “ding dong” but not “dong ding,” “zig zag” but not “zag zig,” and “flip flop” but not “flop flip.” The same strict word order applies to tick tock, riff raff, ping pong, King Kong, wishy washy, etc. This is the rule of ablaut reduplication: if there are two words, the first is i and the second is either a or o. If there are three words, then the order is i, a, o. (Reader’s Digest)

This list was inspired by a similar list from Tom Whitwell, which I recommend checking out. And if you enjoyed this list, I’d encourage you to share it.