52 Things I Learned in 2024

Here are some of the most interesting things I learned this year:

1. Employees who use Firefox or Chrome have a 15% higher retention rate and report more satisfaction at work than employees who use Internet Explorer or Safari. This is because they’re less likely to accept the default way of doing things. (“What your web browser says about you“)
2. Doctors are 14% more likely to diagnose a child with ADHD on October 31, not because there are more kids with ADHD, but because the kids are excited to go trick-or-treating. (“Halloween, ADHD, and Subjectivity in Medical Diagnosis“)
3. It takes nine out of ten Americans to agree on a policy in order for it to have a 50% chance of being approved. (Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America)
4. When men feel their masculinity is threatened, they are 24 percentage-points more likely to want to buy an SUV. They are also willing to pay $7,320 more than non-threatened men for the same vehicle. (“Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis“)
5. Swearing improves grip strength by 9%, wall sit time by 22%, and plank time by 12%. (“Effect of swearing on physical performance“)
6. Every culture has a word for black and white. If a culture has a third word for a color, it is always red. If it has a fourth word, it is either yellow or green. (Wikipedia)
7. Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.“)
8. Indian Americans own about half of all motels in the United States. Of them, 70% have the last name Patel. (Life Behind the Lobby)
9. About 25% of the decline of casual sex among young men since 2007 can be explained by video games. (“Why Are Fewer Young Adults Having Casual Sex?“)
10. ChatGPT caused a 2% drop in the number of freelance jobs posted on Upwork. (“The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market“)
11. AI produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than humans! Humans emit 27g of CO2 in the time it takes to write three hundred words. ChatGPT, however, performs the same task in 4.4 seconds and produces only 2.2g of CO2. (“The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans“)
    
    

    

12. Russia fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for blocking pro-Russia media channels on YouTube. The fine doubles each week it remains unpaid. After 219 weeks, Google will owe Russia a googol. (“Russia fined Google more than Earth’s entire GDP for a Millennium“)
13. For every 10% increase in missionaries to China from a Congressional district, a Congressman was 8% more likely to vote for foreign aid in subsequent decades. (“Missionaries and the Birth of International Development“)
14. In 2018, truckers in Maine received an extra $5 million in overtime pay because of the ambiguity created by the Oxford comma in a state law. (“Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million“)
15. After fluoride is introduced into a city’s drinking water, the number of dentist offices drops 9%. (“Equilibrium effects of public goods: The impact of community water fluoridation on dentists“)
16. Legalization of online sports betting generates an 8% increase in credit card debt among sports betters. The poor are disproportionately affected: low income households spend 32% more on betting than high income households. (“Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting’s Impact on Vulnerable Households“)
17. Fidget spinners do not work. (“Putting a negative spin on it: Using a fidget spinner can impair memory for a video lecture“)
18. It takes twice as long to cook a chicken today compared to 100 years ago because twenty-first century chickens get less exercise. (The Essential New York Times Cookbook)
19. American baby names trends shifted from family names a century ago to popular names a generation ago to popular endings today. A generation of people named Jason has given way to babies with -son endings: Mason, Jackson, Grayson, and Carson. Today, 48% of the top 500 baby names share only ten endings. (“The mysterious tyranny of trendy baby names“)
    

    

    
    
    

    

20. Irish peacekeepers have been in Lebanon so long that some Lebanese are developing Irish accents. (“Irish peacekeepers stood their ground in the face of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.“)
21. In 1985, a black bear in northern Georgia died from a cocaine overdose. It was stuffed and is now at the Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, Kentucky. Because of a loophole in Kentucky marriage law, it is allowed to perform legally binding weddings. (Wikipedia)
22. The Moon is part of the Diocese of Orlando, in accordance with the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which states that “any newly discovered territory was placed under the jurisdiction of the diocese from which the expedition which discovered that territory left.” (“Does the Church Have Jurisdiction Over the Moon?“)
23. Going to the moon was never popular. The only time a majority of Americans supported the Apollo program was right after the Apollo 11 landing, when 53% did. (“Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight“)
24. Women are more likely to recommend shorter haircuts to clients they believe are as attractive or more attractive than themselves. (“Off with her hair: Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair“)
    

    

25. Heavy metal guitarists who play fast tend to have higher rates of intrasexual competitiveness, too. The main motivating factor behind becoming a heavy metal guitarist is not to impress women, but to impress other men. (“Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success“)
26. Pregnancy burns 50,000 calories. (Also, according to Claude, it also takes 50,000 calories to keep a small maple tree alive for one year; generate 12 pounds of honey; drive an electric car for 20 miles; run five marathons; heat a hot tub from room temperature to 104°; or dissipate the energy from a baseball-size meteor entering the upper atmosphere at 40,000mph. Happy Mothers Day!) “Metabolic loads and the costs of metazoan reproduction“)
27. Because they lose their hearing as they age, men over the age of twenty-five can’t hear noises higher than 17.4 kHz. Shopkeepers in the U.K. invented an alarm that plays 17.4 kHz at 100 decibels to drive away loiterers—mostly young men. (Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution)
28. By A.D. 750, because of copying errors and general forgetting-what-he-looked-like, the image of the Roman emperor on English coins evolved into a porcupine. (“Money, art, and representation: the powerful and pragmatic faces of medieval coinage“)
29. People overestimate others’ dishonesty by about 13.6%. (“Belief versus Reality: People Overestimate the Actual Dishonesty of Others”)
30. Vultures in India and Pakistan are dying from ingesting trace amounts of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory given to cattle throughout India and Pakistan. Because of this, Zoroastrians burial rites, which require vultures, are under threat. (“‘Our culture is dying’: vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites“)
31. The programming language C is 75.88 times more energy efficient than Python and 71.9 times faster. (“Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency“)
    

    

32. On average, spouses in the United States have genetic similarity equivalent to that between 4th and 5th cousins. (“We find that the genomes of observed spousal pairs are significantly more similar than that of opposite-sex pairs drawn from the same population. As a benchmark, the magnitude of this similarity roughly corresponds to the similarity between 4th and 5th cousins.”) (“Assortative mating at loci under recent natural selection in humans“)
33. Members of all-male groups are more prone to lying than groups comprised of both men and women. When the first woman joins an all-male group, the rate of lying plummets. (“Honesty of Groups: Effects of Size and Gender Composition“)
34. The requirement that homes be built at least 21 meters apart in parts of the UK dates back to a 1902 regulation drafted by two men who determined this was closest they could be to each other before they could see the other’s nipples through their shirts. (“Edwardian morals, Thatcher and bad design – why Britain’s homes are so hot“)
35. Men are more likely to order two hamburgers at McDonald’s when they order with a screen. When they order from a human, they tend to order only one. (Rory Sutherland)
36. A Massachusetts law requires that fortune tellers be licensed and prohibits “pretended fortune telling.” (“Massachusetts law about fortune tellers“) (via Marginal Revolution)
37. Baby simulators, originally intended to deter teenage pregnancy, actually made girls more likely to get pregnant. Girls who had a baby simulator had an 8% pregnancy rate compared to 4% for girls who didn’t. (“Efficacy of infant simulator programmes to prevent teenage pregnancy“)
38. In the 1990s, then-leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-ll, and current leader Kim Jong-Un got fake Brazilian passports and went to Disneyland in Tokyo (probably). (“North Korea and the Brazil passports: Why were they used by the Kims?“)
39. Negative TV coverage of gas prices starts when gas hits $3.50 per gallon. Each 50-cent increase in gas prices generates an additional 7.5 percentage points of coverage. Fox News covers gas prices most often. (“Bad news bias in gasoline price coverage“)
    

    

40. Car seats are not required on planes because it would reduce seat supply and raise fares, causing more families to drive. Because driving is more dangerous than flying, for every child a required car seat would save on an airplane, 60 would die in car accidents. (NTSB)
41. Each additional negative word in a news headline drives 2.3% more clicks. (“Negativity drives online news consumption“)
42. People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch. (“How long does it take to buy a house?“)
43. In 2019, the United States spent 1% of its federal budget on kidney dialysis. (“Patients vs. Profits: Who Wins in the Traditional U.S. Dialysis System?“)
44. In species where males invest in weaponry (antlers, horns, tusks, etc.), female brains are bigger. (“Brains vs Brawn: Relative brain size is sexually dimorphic amongst weapon-bearing ruminants“)
45. The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1. It was actually a manhole cover accidently blown off test shaft during a nuclear test in Nevada 38 days earlier. It reached speeds equal to six times Earth’s escape velocity and was never found. (Wikipedia)
46. Donations to the NRA increase 30% the year after a school shooting occurs in a county. (“School shootings increase NRA donations“)
47. The producers of Mork and Mindy needed censors who spoke four languages to catch all the swear words Robin Williams tried to sneak in. (YouTube)
48. The lottery for getting drafted to fight in the Vietnam War wasn’t actually random. The numbers drawn came from a tub that was not thoroughly mixed, and the person drawing almost always drew from the top. (Misha Teplitskiy) Monte Carlo simulations estimate the probability the numbers were randomly drawn was 0.09%. (Understanding Probability)
    

    

49. Foreign leaders and diplomats who stay at the White House are entitled to courtesy laundry service. Most guests need only one or two items cleaned, except, apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu, who brings suitcases full of dirty laundry on each visit. (He denies this.) (“Israel’s Netanyahu brings his dirty laundry to Washington. Literally.“)
50. Waymo self-driving taxis generate 88% fewer property damage claims and 92% fewer bodily injury claims than human drivers. After driving 25.3 million miles, Waymo Driver had nine property damage claims and two injury claims, compared to 78 property damage claims and 26 injury claims from humans who drive an equivalent number of miles. (“New Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles“)
51. Among luxury brands, an increase in the size of the logo by one point on a seven-point scale results in a $122.26 price decrease for Gucci and a $26.27 decrease for Louis Vuitton. (The Status Game)
52. Bulls can’t see red. It’s not red that makes them mad. It’s “being treated like crap” that makes them mad. (Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution)

Previous 52 things I learned: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018