52 things I learned in 2022 - Kent Hendricks
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By the time the Saturn V rocket clears the launch tower, it has burned 4% of its fuel.
In 1992, Southwest Airlines and Stevens Aviation resolved a trademark dispute with an arm wrestling match between their CEOs.
You call it tea if it first came to your country via by ship, but you call it chai if it first came to your country over land. This is because speakers in the port cities of the Chinese coastal province of Fujian called it “te”, while overland Manderin-speaking traders used the word “chá.”
Compared to irritant-induced crying (e.g. caused by onions), the tears you cry when you’re sad contain 24% more protein, which means they roll down your face more slowly and are more likely to be noticed by others, who, in turn, can comfort you.
The fundamental limit to the amount of information that can be stored in a given space (like a hard drive) is ~10⁶⁹ bits per m². If you try to store information more densely than this limit, your hard drive will collapse into a black hole.
At art auctions, people bid 18.57% more for blue-hued paintings compared to neutral paintings. A one standard deviation increase in blue hue (20%) increases the amount people are willing to pay by 10.63%
Employees whose boss has an MBA make 6% less than employees whose boss never went to business school.
95% of mosh pits rotate counterclockwise, and it’s possibly related to handedness.
When a restaurant gets a Michelin star, the median home price in the neighborhood goes up 0.5%. (“Michelin Guide Restaurants’ Effect on Neighborhood Economic Development”) The average menu price goes up 5% and dish descriptions on the menu are 10%–12% longer.
In 1810, nails accounted for roughly 0.4% of GDP in the United States, equivalent to the role of the airline industry or computer manufacturing in today’s economy.
When an Apple store opens in a mall, foot traffic goes up 10% in every other store.
People who grow up in cities with grids (like Chicago) are worse at navigation. They are also more likely to lose at video games.
Herds of cattle align themselves north-south while grazing.
The F-word is 29% easier to pronounce thanks to the agricultural revolution. Humans developed overbites in response to diets made up of softer foods, which affected speech as well: among other things, it’s 29% easier to pronounce labiodentals (“f” and “v” sounds) with an overbite, which prompted the change in many Indo-European languages from words like patēr to the Old English faeder.
Most trees are phylogenetically unrelated to each other: the common ancestor of maples and mulberry trees was not a tree, while the common ancestor of stinging nettles and strawberries was a tree.
In medieval Germany (before 1200), it was legal for husbands and wives to settle their disputes by fighting with clubs, but to make it fair the husband had to stand in a waist-deep hole.
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