Things I Learned

  1. Pumpkin spice does not contain any pumpkin
  2. The average professional men’s tennis player hits 44% of their groundstrokes from the backhand side. (source)
  3. The cardinal bird is named after cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, whose attire is blood-like red to symbolize their willingness to die for their faith. (source)
  4. The average nobel laureate grew up in a 87-90th percentile household (source)
  5. The shortest recorded war in history was the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, which lasted a total of 38 minutes. (source)
  6. 7 of the first 9 presidents were fully bilingual (6 spoke french; Martin Van Buren spoke dutch as his first language) and no subsequent president has been bilingual except FDR (h/t).
  7. 4% of British adults earn more than £70,000 ($90,000) annually (source).
  8. The lighter was invented before the match (source).
  9. Federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP in the US have been remarkably stable, averaging about 17.5 per cent since the 1950s (source).
  10. There are two palindromic temperatures in the Celsius / Farenheit scale; 16 C = 61 F and 28 C = 82 F. (source)
  11. Over the past 30 years, the fraction of Americans holding a passport increased nine-fold, from 5% in 1990 to 48% in 2023. (cite).
  12. Under Islamic law, regardless of the school of thought, Muslim women may not marry non-Muslim men, while Muslim men may only marry non-Muslim women (so long as they are people of the book). (source)

Graphs I liked

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