S/1999 U 2

Things I Learned in 2024

· 15 min read

  1. Bronze Age iron artifacts likely originated from meteorites, not from smelting terrestrial iron 🏆☄️. A geochemical approach using Fe:Co:Ni ratios can distinguish terrestrial from extraterrestrial iron. Modern iron and iron ores have distinct Fe:Co:Ni ratios compared to those found in Bronze Age artifacts.

  2. The U.S. never adopted the metric system due to Caribbean pirates 📐🏴‍☠️. When the U.S. was considering standardizing measurements, Thomas Jefferson arranged for French scientist Joseph Dombey to deliver a kilogram standard. British privateers intercepted Dombey in the Caribbean, leading to his capture and eventual death. The kilogram standard reached the U.S. too late to influence the metric system’s adoption.

  3. Any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less 🧊🤔. Researchers computed all possible cube positions, using about 35 CPU-years of computing time donated by Google.

  4. The Kellogg’s brand has split in 2023, forming WK Kellogg Co for its North American cereal division and rebranding the remaining operations to Kellanova 🥣🍿💔. BTW: Big Snack is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. For example:

    • In 2012, Kellogg’s became the world’s second-largest snack food company by acquiring Pringles from Procter & Gamble.
    • PepsiCo ranks as the second-largest food and beverage company globally, after Nestlé.
    • Nestlé is a major shareholder of L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics company.
    • PepsiCo owns 23 brands that generate over US$1 billion in sales annually (as of 2021).
    • Lipton beverages are sold by “Pepsi Lipton International”, jointly owned by Unilever and PepsiCo.
    • Unilever was created in 1929 from the merger of British soap maker Lever Brothers and Dutch margarine company Margarine Unie.
    • The 7up brand and formula are owned by Keurig Dr Pepper, though internationally distributed by PepsiCo.
    • Many brands from the three largest soda producers—The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr Pepper—are intended as direct, equivalent competitors.
    • Axe or Lynx, launched in 1983, is a French brand owned by Unilever

  5. Speaking of snacks: Most potato chips are seasoned by a select few seasoning houses 🥔🧂. These seasoning houses develop new flavors for global markets. They work closely with big snack brands, but stay low-profile to protect proprietary formulas and keep competitors guessing.

  6. Tyromancy is the art of fortune-telling with cheese 🧙‍♂️🔮🧀.

    Back then, a typical use for tyromancy was to determine who you would marry. You’d simply carve the names of all potential suitors into some pieces of cheese, then wait to see which one molded first. And there it was—your life partner! People also analyzed the number and size of holes in a block of cheese, the patterns of the mold and veins, and the shapes that curds made as they coagulated.

  7. Recent studies using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory have updated the perceived colors of Neptune and Uranus, showing both planets share a similar shade of greenish-blue 🪐. This challenges the long-held belief that Neptune was deep blue and Uranus pale cyan. That earlier impression came from poorly balanced composite images from the 20th century, including Voyager 2 imagery.

  8. Most people can intuitively understand chicken emotions 🐓. Approximately 70% of study participants could accurately interpret excitement or discontent from chicken clucks, regardless of their experience with chickens.

  9. The ancient Phoenician city of Byblos is the origin of the terms book and bible 📖. Byblos was renowned for exporting papyrus. This fed into the Greek “biblos” (papyrus/scroll), which became “biblion” (little scroll) and then the plural “biblia” (books). In Latin, “biblia” eventually got treated as singular, meaning the scriptures as one unified Book.

  10. God rays or crepuscular rays are sunbeams visible when the Sun is near the horizon, obscured by clouds, during twilight. A related phenomenon is anticrepuscular rays, appearing in the opposite direction of the setting or rising sun 🌄🌅

  11. Wikipedia has a list of tautological place names – places where different parts of the name mean the same thing 🗣🗣.

    • Lake Baikal, Russia (‘Lake Rich lake’ – From the Turkic baj (rich, though this is disputed) and kal (lake).
    • Mekong River - A triple tautonym. ‘Mae’ in Thai is an abbreviation for “river”, while ‘khong’ is an old Austroasiatic word for river. Mekong River can thus be translated as “river river river”

  12. The US has more golf courses than McDonald’s locations ⛳🏌️‍♂️🍟🍔. As of 2024, there are about 16,000 golf courses and about 13,000 McDonald’s locations in the United States. McDonald’s is heavily concentrated in urban areas (highest density in East Los Angeles and just outside Chicago). Golf courses are more evenly distributed, including in less populated areas, especially in the Midwest. (Via Kottke)

  13. 150 of the world’s 700 Seke speakers live in two buildings in Brooklyn 🏙.. The Endangered Language Alliance, dedicated to preserving languages spoken by small populations, notes that New York City is home to more than 700 languages, with over 150 at significant risk of extinction. About 150 Seke speakers, originally from a handful of villages in Nepal, live in two adjacent apartment buildings in Brooklyn. (Via Neatorama)

  14. The ‘bite’ in Apple’s logo was designed to match the curvature of the Motter Tektura typeface’s lowercase “a” 🍎. The Motter Tektura typeface was used by Apple in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. It was designed by Othmar Motter of Vorarlberger Graphik in 1975 and was part of Apple’s branding and was utilized in various promotional materials, packaging, and product labeling.

  15. Before 1971, one British pound was divided into 20 shillings, and one shilling was equal to 12 pence (so there were 240 pence in a pound) 💷. After decimalization in 1971, one pound was divided into 100 pence. The shilling stayed in circulation until 1990, and after decimalization it was worth five new pence.

  16. A snow leopard is not a species of leopard ❄️🐆. The snow leopard (Panthera uncia, formerly Uncia uncia) and the leopard (Panthera pardus) are distinct species within the Panthera genus (alongside lions, tigers, and jaguars). Genetic studies suggest snow leopards are more closely related to tigers (Panthera tigris) than to leopards.

  17. Margarine was invented in 1869 🧈.

    Napoleon III had offered a prize to the person who could devise “a substitute product for ordinary butter, cheaper and which keeps well, for the navy and the less well-off classes,” which Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, a French chemist, won with a mixture of tallow, water, skim milk, and sodium bicarbonate.

    Mège-Mouriès named his creation oleomargarine, the “margarine” being derived from the Greek word for “pearl.”

    Mouriès licensed his invention to Jurgens, the Dutch company that would, several mergers later, put the Uni in Unilever.

  18. Women were forbidden from climbing Mt. Fuji until 1872 🇯🇵🌋✋. The main reason was that women, especially beautiful ones, might make Konohana-sakuya-hime, the Shinto goddess associated with Mt. Fuji, angry and cause Mt. Fuji to erupt. (Via Chris Broad)

  19. 2023 was the safest year for flying ✈️💀 On average, there was 1 accident per 1.26 million flights, and only 1 fatal accident (a turboprop with 72 fatalities).

  20. Agave belongs to the asparagus family

  21. Follow up from 2023: Reindeer might see UV in order to see lichens I’m not really sure what’s new in this 2023 work compared to the 2011 article, to be honest. My best guess: the newer work more directly shows that lichens absorb UV light and look dark against snow in the UV range. It seems to lean more toward ecology/visual search, rather than just sensory physiology.

  22. Published in 1631, the Wicked Bible mistakenly omitted the word “not” from the sentence “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. Wicked, indeed 😏

  23. Earthquakes on the U.S. East Coast are felt farther than ones on the West Coast The reason? East of the Rocky Mountains, much of the rocky underground is hundreds of millions of years older than the subterranean formations to the west. Older rocks tend to be harder and denser, and older fault lines have had more time to “heal.” All of that means seismic waves travel more efficiently across the eastern U.S. The reverse is true in the West, where younger faults absorb more of the wave energy, so it doesn’t spread as far. This not only explains why a California quake is felt in a smaller area, but also why this more focused shaking can cause much more damage.

  24. Bumblebees can survive underwater 🐝💦 Queens of the North American common eastern bumblebee can be submerged for up to a week while hibernating. Still impressive, but not quite as miraculous as the headline suggests.

  25. The ability to see “red” wavelengths might have developed by duplicating and mutating the genes responsible for seeing green 💚🧬❤️ This mechanism has been shown in some jumping spiders, where an opsin gene is duplicated, followed by functional divergence. It evolved independently, multiple times, in different jumping spider lineages and is asserted to have occurred in primates.

  26. Thinking about the immortality of the crab 🦀 Pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo is a Spanish idiom used to express that an individual was daydreaming.

  27. Diatribe is the smart word for rant 🤬 It exists in English and French, where it means a denunciatory or inflammatory speech. German uses Diatribe too, but there it’s closer to the Greek original: a milder “scholarly polemical treatise.”

  28. Elephants have names for each other 🐘 Unlike dolphins and parrots,

    While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual. Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver.

    Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual. (Via Yale School of the Environment)

  29. Until 1752, England celebrated New Year on March 25th 🏴📆 For example, 24 March 1707 was immediately followed by 25 March 1708, while the day following 31 December 1708 was 1 January 1708.

    I agree with Matt Parker here—starting the year on the spring equinox makes so much more sense than doing it in the middle of winter. (Via Matt Parker’s wonderful book Love Triangle)

  30. Walnut derives from “nut of the speaker of a Romance language” 🌰 Originally this referred to Celts; later, it referred to Latin/Romance speakers, who introduced the nut to Germanic-speaking regions from areas under Roman cultural and linguistic influence.

  31. France was on UTC+0 before WWII and was switched to “Berlin time” during occupation 🇫🇷⏰ It subsequently remained on CET after the war rather than reverting to UTC+0.

    Bonus: The Netherlands used “Dutch time”, which was GMT +0h 19m 32.13s, until it was simplified to GMT +0h 20m in 1937. When Germany occupied the Netherlands in World War II, Berlin Time was adopted. (Via Reddit)

  32. The human brain doesn’t have a single visual cortex 🧠👀 There are, in fact, multiple cortical areas, like the primary visual cortex (V1), and V2-V6.

  33. Prepaid electricity meters used to be a thing in the UK 🪙⚡ This type of meter used to be common in the UK, especially in rental apartments. To get electricity, you had to put coins into the meter, which would then release a certain amount of energy. Once the coins ran out, the power shut off, and you had to insert more coins to restore service. (Via Mr. Bean)

    Bonus reading

  34. Trees exposed to wildfire smoke “hold their breath" 💨🌲 Dense wildfire smoke triggers stomatal closure, effectively halting gas exchange between the leaf interior and the atmosphere.

  35. Cats have vertical pupils because they help with low-light conditions and enable high precision in judging prey distance 🐈👁️ Vertical pupils can expand and contract over a very large range (up to ~135× area change), allowing effective vision from bright daylight to near darkness. They also enhance depth perception via blur gradients. Blur is preserved primarily along horizontal contours (e.g., the ground), leading to a strong gradient of defocus with distance, which small, ground-level predators can exploit to estimate prey distance.

  36. 20 farming families use more water from the Colorado River than entire states 🚰🐮 Farmers in one family, the Abattis, used an estimated 260,000 acre-feet—more water than the entire Las Vegas metropolitan area uses (serves over 2 million people).

    Most use the bulk of their water growing hay to feed livestock

    Nota bene: Acre-foot truly is a cursed unit

  37. A stylite or pillar-saint is a type of Christian ascetic who lives on pillars, preaching, fasting, and praying 😇

    The first known stylite was Simeon Stylites the Elder who climbed a pillar in Syria in 423 CE and remained there until his death 36 years later.

  38. Did you ever read about a topic you’re an expert in and think ’this isn’t right’? 🤔

    “Gell-Mann amnesia effect” describes the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible.

  39. ‘The data on extreme human aging is rotten from the inside out’ The 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Demography goes to

    Saul Justin Newman, for detective work in discovering that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.

    Here is Newman himself:

    I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.

    The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public.

    Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.

  40. Brother, the printer company, was originally founded as a sewing machine manufacturer 🪡. It was founded in 1908 when it was originally called Yasui Sewing Machine Co in Nagoya, Japan. The company name derives from an early sewing machine model, the Brother, which itself was named for the Yasui brothers, Masayoshi and Jitsuichi. Though mostly known for its printers, nowadays, Brother still has a fairly large sewing machine division.

  41. The word escalate was coined by the Escalator, not the other way around 🛗. Escalator was originally trademarked by the Otis company. Inventor Charles Seeberger coined the word from scala, Latin for “steps,” to express “move using steps,” as opposed to the “elevator,” which raises things to another level.

    Bonus: The German word eskalieren also comes from English.

  42. Red Pandas Aren’t Named After Pandas 🐼

    People were calling red pandas (Ailurus fulgens) “pandas” since early in the 19th century, some 40 years before anyone called the bears “pandas.”

    The bears that we now call pandas were then named “giant pandas”. Over time, as the giant pandas became increasingly famous, Ailurus fulgens became known as “lesser pandas,” then red pandas. Finally, giant pandas became commonly known simply as “pandas.”

    (Via Cracked)

  43. Soy (beans) were named after the sauce. The sauce was originally Chinese, and “soy” (shōyu) was the Japanese word for the sauce. People had various unrelated names for the beans, like dòu in Chinese or daizu in Japanese.

    Three “Things I Learned” items I took from this Cracked article in a row—what a lovely article Ryan Menezes published.

  44. To impregnate something (your shoe) and to impregnate someone (your partner) have the same linguistic root Same goes for the German word imprägnieren.

  45. North Korea has launched thousands of balloons, filled with trash, toward South Korea

    Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a powerful ruling party official, has described the balloons as “gifts of sincerity” for South Koreans.

    The North has said it is retaliating to a propaganda campaign by activists in the South, who regularly send inflatables in the other direction, loaded with anti-Pyongyang leaflets along with food, medicine, money and USB sticks carrying K-pop videos and dramas.

  46. “Anus and Gold have the same numerical value”

    I once discovered this while casually calculating.

    – Strato of Sardis

    Gematria is an alphanumeric system in which letters are assigned numerical values and words or names are interpreted by summing those values. It originated in Hebrew tradition but appears in Greek and other alphabets as well. The association of 666 with Nero (Nero Caesar) in the Book of Revelation is a standard example using Hebrew gematria, where the Hebrew spelling of “Neron Caesar” yields the total 666.

    That numerical value for anus/gold is 1570, btw.

  47. Early depictions of Jesus Christ as the shepherd are often indistinguishable from Roman depictions of the god Hermes 🐑 The depiction is called the Kriophoros Figure (the ram bearer) and was closely associated with the god Hermes.

  48. A new species of shark is discovered approximately every two weeks 🦈. (Via Kottke)

  49. The Altar Stone at Stonehenge was transported to the site from more than 700 km away in Scotland 🪦 (Via Kottke)

  50. The genetic basis for lactase persistence is completely different in North Africans and West Africans than in Sudan and Kenya North African and West African populations predominantly carry lactase-persistence–associated variants that are different from those common in East Africa.

  51. Alief is the mental state where one’s behavior, emotion, or response conflicts with one’s explicit beliefs

    A person watching a sad movie may believe that the characters are completely fictional, but their aliefs may lead them to cry nonetheless. A person who is hesitant to eat fudge that has been formed into the shape of feces, or who exhibits reluctance in drinking from a sterilized bedpan may believe that the substances are safe to eat and drink, but may alieve that they are not.

  52. “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” at every movie (and video game, nowadays) can be traced back to the murder of Rasputin

    It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.