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Hello and greetings from New Orleans. This is a (day late) version of January’s Things I Learned.

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Things I Learned

  1. 15% of all Uber ride bookings either begin or end at an airport (source).
  2. There were cuneiform spreadsheets (source, h/t)
  3. Mr. Potato Head was the first toy to be advertised on television. (source)
  4. KLM, the Dutch national airline, flies to twice as many destinations in the U.K. as does British Airways (source and source).
  5. Viviparity is a phenomenon found in plants where they reproduce through live births, essentially forgoing the use of seeds to spread new descendants and instead growing a child plant right away, while still attached to its parent plant. Mangroves are one example of this. (source)
  6. Hugo Boss was the primary supplier of uniforms for the Nazi army. (source)
  7. The world’s largest human gathering in history — with 400 million people in attendance — is a festival called Maha Kumbh Mela that commemorates a legend in which demons and gods fight over a pitcher carrying the nectar of immortality (source).
  8. From 2010 to 2014, life expectancy in Syria fell from 79.5 to 55.7. (source)
  9. The Graham cracker was invented by the temperance movement preacher Sylvester Graham as a purposefully dull cracker that would curb sinful desires, including the prevention of masturbation. (source)
  10. Delta involuntarily bumped exactly 1 passenger in 2024. American Airlines bumped 13,200 (source).
  11. Pandas, the most popular data analysis library for the most popular coding language (Python), was invented at the hedge fund AQR. (source)
  12. In the 1850s, the US suffered large fires (i.e., those destroying 20+ buildings) once every two weeks. Over the same period, England, with a similar population size, suffered them in its provincial towns once every two or three years. (source)
  13. 25% of the New York City’s MTA — roughly 22,000 employees — make 6 figure salaries. (source).
  14. The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) is the only horror movie to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Only 6 other horror films have ever been nominated. (source)
  15. The average margin of victory is 12.2 points in the NBA, 3.5 points in the MLB, 2.3 points in the NHL, and 11.1 points in the NFL.
  16. Denmark, South Korea, the UK, and the US are the only countries in the OECD to tax estates. (source)
  17. The northern and southern hemisphere are artifacts of the earth’s geometry (the equator), while the Western and Eastern hemispheres are entirely human-made, arbitrary designations. (source)
    1. Also, Africa is the only continent with land in all four hemispheres.