52 things I learned in 2024

Previously: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

1 | Mice don't particularly like cheese. They're known for eating it because they could easily find it aging uncovered in cellars, but exterminators say their favorite food is actually peanut butter. [Livescience via Kent Hendricks]

2 | If you pick a random ancestor of yours from at least 12 generations ago, you probably don't share any genes. [gcbias via ACX]

3 | Parents of newborns today who follow recommended practices sleep an hour less per night than previous generations. About half of that is from putting babies to sleep on their back instead of facing down (which is important for preventing infant deaths, but causes them to wake up more often); the other half is due to breastfeeding instead of formula feeding (which is said to have health benefits, but takes longer and doesn't fill them up as well¹). [@ruthgracewong]

4 | NASA tried to put Big Bird onto the 1986 Challenger space shuttle launch to get kids interested in science, but there wasn't enough room. (That shuttle exploded on live TV, with no survivors.) [NBC via Shutdown Fullcast]

5 | Even with bigger homes, bigger vehicles, and countless new gadgets, the average American uses less energy today than in the 1960s because everything is much more efficient. [Not the End of the World]

6 | Some children (though not all, and perhaps not even many) are now learning a different version of the alphabet song: ABCDEFG / HIJKLMN / OPQ / RST / UVW / XYZ. This is because the fast "LMNOP" and the ending "Y-and-Z" can make it hard to hear the letters distinctly. [@mindfulteacherrachel]

7 | NFL teams collectively serve 80,000 Uncrustables in a season (mainly at halftime of games and after practices). The Broncos alone go through 700 per week. [@samkouvaris]

8 | Donations of medical equipment to poor countries often backfire because the recipients don't have enough materials or expertise to fix things when they break. (For example, a town in Indonesia received eight incubators for premature babies in 2004, but they were all out of commission by 2008.) Aid providers now seek out equipment that's not state-of-the-art but is instead designed to break in easily repairable ways. [Where Good Ideas Come From]

9 | Pokémon Go made more revenue in 2023 than Duolingo. [@juliey4]

10 | All 24 eligible players who have made an All-WNBA team were ranked in the top 40 of their high school recruiting class; 70% were in the top 10. That's a much stronger correlation with high school reputation than NBA players have, probably because women tend to finish growing at a younger age than men. [The Next]

11 | Teenage girls are now 20% more likely to have tried marijuana than boys. (Ten years ago it was the opposite.) [MDPI]

12 | By one estimate, Prohibition increased the share of American GDP spent on alcohol, because it increased prices more than it reduced consumption. [The Rise and Fall of American Growth]

13 | There are more golf courses than McDonald's in the U.S. [NYT]

14 | Muppets creator Jim Henson was supposed to play Big Bird on Sesame Street, but the show's costume designer "did not think that Henson was walking like a bird is supposed to walk," so Caroll Spinney got the job (and held it for nearly 50 years). [Wikipedia]

15 | People can feel imperfections as small as 10 nanometers (.00001 millimeters) on a smooth surface. [@AskYatharth]

16 | Paris Olympics organizers ordered more than two million bananas for the dining halls. For 15,000 competitors over two weeks, that comes out to 10 bananas per person per day. (I'm not sure if coaches or other non-athletes also dined there, but they'd eat less anyway, and the article makes it seem like they're planning around athlete needs in particular.) [Eater]

17 | In the 1980s, New Jersey and Chicago banned teens from using pagers (fearing they were used for drug deals). [Pessimists Archive]

18 | None of the sentences in the original "Ship of Theseus" Wikipedia page remain there today. [@depthsofwiki]

19 | In 2004, about one gigawatt of new solar power was installed worldwide; in 2024, nearly twice that was installed per day. [@CardiffGarcia]

20 | If you tell ChatGPT that you're a Dallas Cowboys fan, it'll think you're more conservative, and it'll avoid left-leaning responses; it does the opposite if you say you're a Detroit Lions fan. (For some reason, it tends to avoid answering sensitive questions at all if you say you support the Chargers.) [ArXiV via Ethan Mollick]

21 | There's no evidence that any immigrants' names were changed at Ellis Island. [Documents to the People via Marginal Revolution]

22 | Cookie Monster's cookies are made of things like puffed rice, instant coffee, and black glue chips—optimized to explode amusingly and not get stuck in his fur. [NYT via Kent Hendricks]

23 | In one study, parents who were told their child had eaten a lot of sugar said they were much more hyperactive than parents who weren't, even though all the children actually got a placebo. [Otherwise]

24 | writing in all lowercase letters generally saves you in data storage, because all-lowercase text can be compressed more efficiently. [endtimes.dev]

25 | The first drug test that caused someone to lose an Olympic medal was for beer. (He was competing in the shooting portion of the modern pentathlon, where alcohol arguably enhances performance by slowing your heart rate.) [SBNation]

26 | In the 1950s, the New York Times reportedly refused to run an ad for a breast cancer support group, not only because it didn't want to say "breast" in print, but also because it didn't want to say "cancer." (It suggested "diseases of the chest wall" as an alternative.) I, and many others, initially read this as a larger sign of the paper's and society's unwillingness to face hard truths about cancer, but actually the Times ran plenty of articles about breast cancer around then; the ad story must have been one editor's idiosyncratic decision. [The Emperor of All Maladies; Dan Nguyen]

27 | "Baby Shark" probably evolved from the Jaws theme song. [Decoder Ring]

28 | America has more homicides than other developed countries, but that's not new; even in the early 20th century the US homicide rate was five times higher than in any European country. [The Rise and Fall of American Growth]

29 | Tattooing was technically illegal in NYC from 1961 to 1997. [NYT]

30 | "Baker's chocolate" and "German chocolate cake" are actually named after people. (Don't even ask about San Francisco's "Main Street.") [Things Unexpectedly Named After People via ACX]

31 | The average home in every mainland US state is larger than the average home in any European country. [@StatisticUrban]

32 | Half of NYC's thousands of bodegas (and now a large share of its unlicensed weed shops) are owned by Yemenis. [Search Engine podcast, NYT]

33 | Administrative costs have been the same share of college budgets for 50 years. The long-term rise in tuition is instead driven by a) governments paying a smaller share of costs, and b) faculty wages rising (in line with other highly educated professions). [Alex Tabarrok]

34 | LEGO now heavily advertises sets to build a specific object instead of generic pieces, which is often used as a sign that we're suppressing children's imagination. But another (non-mutually-exclusive) explanation is that there's less competition: other companies could create generic blocks that are almost as good, but nobody else has a license from Disney to create Star Wars blueprints. [Byrne Hobart]

35 | Neptune is actually white-ish; the original photos in which it appears blue were not color-corrected. [The Intrinsic Perspective]

36 | Before COVID-19, people of all incomes lived 10-15 miles from work on average. Today, low-income workers live 18 miles away, and the highest-income workers live more than 40 miles away. [@crampell]

37 | In the early days of home telephones, AT&T built a "dropping machine" to test if particular models could handle being hung up casually thousands of times. [The Idea Factory]

38 | According to an independent study, Uber and Lyft reduced US vehicle deaths by about 5%, presumably by providing an alternative to drunk driving. [@albrgr]

39 | "Wacky inflatable arm guys" have been around for less than three decades. (They were invented for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.) [Summer of Champions]

40 | Apple sorts its iPhone boxes and lids into three size groups and pairs those together so they fit ever so slightly better. [@Ryan_Gasoline]

41 | Dialysis treatment alone accounts for about 1% of the federal budget (via Medicare). [Complex Systems]

42 | Headlights on 2024 cars are nearly twice as bright as those on 2015 cars. [The Ringer]

43 | Death during childbirth is more common in the US than in other countries, which is very bad—but oft-cited statistics showing that it's getting much worse over time are misleading; that's mostly due to changes in how deaths are reported. [Noahpinion]

44 | Sending your partner funny Tweets/Tiktoks/Reels throughout the day is called “pebbling,” like how penguins leave pebbles in their partners' nests as a sign of affection. [@thisone0verhere]

45 | The official distinction between a horse and a pony is only based on size, not age. [Money Stuff podcast]

46 | Jessie J wrote the first lyrics to "Party in the USA" for her own debut album, but the label didn't think it fit her, so together they pitched it to Miley Cyrus. (Jessie J came from the UK, so original lyrics included "I hopped off the plane at LAX with my tea and my cardigan" and "jumped in the cab and the driver's on the left side.") [Reels, originally a 2014 Glamour interview]

47 | The median Gen-Z American today is more than twice as wealthy (accounting for debt) than Millennials or Gen X were at the same age. [@ernietedeschi]

48 | Old sports photos sometimes have a hazy background because so many fans were smoking. [Petapixel via Tom Whitwell]

49 | In the 1980s more than 20,000 people per year were injured by automatic garage doors (including a few dozen fatalities). In 2022 there were a total of 34 such injuries, because the industry imposed safety standards like sensors to detect if someone is in the way. [@gengelstein]

50 | Shaquille O'Neal paid for 15 friends to get a master's degree so that he had enough people for the University of Phoenix to give him an in-person course. [@DiabolicalSpuds]

51 | Driscoll's doesn't actually grow any of their berries. (It does research to identify good breeds and then contracts those to third-party growers.) [Odd Lots]

52 | NYC air conditioners look like they're stargazing with their legs out the window. [@AOWTOUDOUZAT]

1. For parents who decide to feed breast milk, this is another point in the case for pumping and bottle feeding.