Greetings from Oslo, Norway where I’ve come to interview the head of the largest ($1.7 trillion) investment fund world in the world. I hope everyone had a happy April; here is what I learned this month.

Things I Learned

  1. Barack Obama is the only US president post-2000 to drink alcohol; Trump, Biden, and W. Bush all maintain strict sobriety. (h/t)
  2. The English word 'much' and its Spanish equivalent 'mucho' are etymologically unrelated. (source)
  3. Rolls Royce generates ~1% of UK GDP. (h/t, source)
  4. Major League Baseball is the only American industry — or sports league — with a judicially created exemption from federal antitrust law, dating to a 1922 ruling that baseball was not interstate commerce. (source)
  5. The Vatican has more Bloomberg terminals than the UK treasury. (source)
  6. At the start of 2025, America held 4.2% of the world’s population, half of its economy, two thirds of global stock-market value, and 9 of the 10 most valuable public companies. (source)
  7. Ciabatta was invented in 1982. (source)
  8. The reason Air France’s logo is a winged seahorse is that at the time (1933) of the merger creating Air France, there was widespread disagreement as to whether airplanes or seaplanes were superior, and the logo was designed to reflect that. (source)
  9. Medicaid paying people to stay at home to take care of relatives accounts for 12% of all private sector jobs in NYC (h/t, source).
  10. The first time a weekend was observed by a company in the US was in 1908, and it was not mandated until 1940. (source)
  11. In the past 30 years, just 6 unique teams have won the English Premier League. (source)
  12. The name "Wendy" was invented by J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan in 1904; it did not exist as a common name before. (source)
  13. Richard Nixon's daughter and Dwight Eisenhower's grandson are married to each other. (source)
  14. In the history of the papacy, no pope had visited the Arabian peninsula before 2019. (source)
  15. Cappuccinos are named after the light brown color of the hooded robes word by friars and nuns of the Capuchin order. (source)
  16. In the US, municipal solid waste — i.e., the technical term for what most people think of when they hear the word garbage (kitchen wastebasket, curbside trash can, etc) —accounts for, at most, 3% of the nation’s waste stream. (source)

Some Useless Data Analysis