The best facts I heard this year
2025-12-21 22:33 GMT
As overhead mostly from my friends.
January 10. South Koreans ate 7.5kg of garlic per person per year between 2010 and 2017, ten times of what Italians consume. Via E.
January 11. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time (300 hours a year) and almost all of it went to watching more TV. Via N.
January 12. As a pedestrian, you can walk across the Thames through Blackfriars station, but you need to buy a special ticket that costs £0.10 and can only be purchased at the station. Via J.
January 13. Napoleon was the winningest general by a lot. “Napoleon’s total WAR was nearly 23 standard deviations above the mean WAR accumulated by generals in the dataset.” Via C.
January 14. Dickens invented our idea of traditional English winter weather probably from experiencing the Little Ice Age. Via M.
January 19. Researchers thought Titan might have a global ocean of liquid hydrocarbons before landing so they designed Huygens to float. Via APOD.
January 20. “The Camden Bench is virtually impossible to sleep on. It is anti-dealer and anti-litter because it features no slots or crevices in which to stash drugs or into which trash could slip. It is anti-theft because the recesses near the ground allow people to store bags behind their legs and away from would be criminals. It is anti-skateboard because the edges on the bench fluctuate in height to make grinding difficult. It is anti-graffiti because it has a special coating to repel paint.” Via D.
January 22. At Heathrow, 99% of slots (the right of an airline to take off or land from an airport at a particular time) are grandfathered. BA holds 51% of those at Heathrow, and 53% at London City. In The Economist.
January 24. President Biden’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar eats “five or six” bananas on mornings she argues in front of the Supreme Court. Via L.
January 29. If you add the four last digits on the zip code, your mail gets there faster. Among many other great zip code facts. Via CGP Grey.
January 30. Germany has a culture of “bring your own kitchen.” Via L.
January 31. Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women. Via G.
February 4. About the North Korean KFC burger binge. Via Marginal Revolution.
February 8. Among Yale alumni in their forties, only 56% of the women still worked, compared with 90% of the men. Via T.
February 16. After leaving Shakespeare’s theatre company, in 1600 actor Will Kempe decided to Morris dance from London to Norwich as a way of maintaining his fame. The feat was repeated in 2015. Via J and here is the repeat.
February 17. The London Guildhall Art Gallery was purpose-built with ceilings high enough to accommodate the weapons held by the Worshipful Company of Pikemen, whom to this day provides ceremonial protection on special occasions. Via J.
February 18. The British sank seven French ships for every one the French sank of theirs in the Napoleonic era, and for battleships they sank 32 French ships to every one lost. Nepo-babies were more likely to sink, burn, or capture enemy ships, regardless of the ship they were given command of or their position in the battle line, and were also more likely to win one-to-one encounters. Via H, writing in the FT.
February 19. Medical schools have “standardized patients” specially trained to teach gynecological and urogenital exams. Via S..
February 20. There are at least two Buddhist monks in Thailand who use Notion to run their monastery. Via L.
February 22. The “lights will guide you home” in Coldplay’s Fix You is the BT Tower (a large tower with a 360 degree LED screen in London), which the band members used to find their way back to their dorm after nights out while in college at UCL. Via E.
February 26. The New York Yankees had a policy that players may have mustaches and sideburns but no other facial hair (“basically locking in the seventies” according to Ben Thompson). They missed out on free agents who didn’t want to shave, and changed their policy this year. In Dithering.
March 5. The origin of the idiom, “teaching grandmother to suck eggs.” It comes from before modern dentistry, so likely many elderly had bad or no teeth, so “a grandmother was usually already a practiced expert on sucking eggs and did not need anyone to show her how to do it.” via E.
March 6. Boots, a pharmacist, once had a booklending library that had had more than 400 branches throughout the UK serving one million subscribers. Via H.
March 7. About the Mao mango cult. Mao gave the Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team, who then preserved the mangoes in formaldehyde or sealed them in wax for veneration. Via J.
March 9. There is a town in Patagonia that speaks Welsh. Via A.
March 10. Denver airport’s area is twice the size of Manhattan, and larger than the city boundaries of Boston, Miami or San Francisco. Via M.
March 15. Really good Geoguessers can tell by the pixelation of the camera image which country they’re in. Anecdata, via S.
March 16. The theft of a Brueghel painting in the Polish National Museum was only discovered when a cleaner knocked the decoy off the wall, revealing that it had been a photo cut from a catalogue. Via J.
March 19. About pork-cat syndrome, where people allergic to cats become allergic to pork. Via S.
March 21. Nearly half of all British air cargo, measured by weight, went through Heathrow in 2023, according to the airport, and 70% when measured by value. Among the most-shipped items are pharmaceuticals and salmon. Via P.
March 22. “Basically, if there’s a neighborhood where people are getting drunk, then trying to take the train line home but falling asleep and missing their stop, only to wake up at the end of the line in the middle of nowhere with no way to get home until the next morning, then that’s a station of despair.” Via L.
March 23. 3% of the Lake District is lakes. Claim.
March 27. About Ernst Hanfstaengl, a personal friend of Hitler who defected to America, was educated at Harvard and claimed to have given Hitler the idea for the Nuremberg rallies from watching American pep rallies. Via J.
March 28. There’s a piano mover in the San Francisco Bay Area who had moved seven pianos by midday. If each piano is $500, that’s millions in ARR! You only need three people to run it. Apparently if there are more than three steps, that’s when they bring in a fourth person. Anecdata from H, a happy customer.
April 7. One Civil Aeronautics Board meeting discussed regulating the thickness of sandwiches on board aircraft. And, in 1977, Southwest Airlines was the largest liquor distributor in the state of Texas. Via P.
April 9. America exports chopsticks to China. Via L.
April 10. An estate agent once won a case that he was being unfairly dismissed because he felt demoted when they moved his desk location. Via J.
April 12. About 80% of the Roman empire’s budget in 150 was spent on the military. Via E.
April 18. The U.S. government has banned American government personnel in China, from any romantic relationships with Chinese citizens. However, existing relationships are grandfathered in. Via A.
April 21. According to Meta, the use of a single book for pretraining boosts model performance by “less than 0.06%.” Therefore, taken individually, a work has no economic value as training data. But that’s 6% for 100 books, huge! Via A.
April 23. Singapore made a deal to be the only Southeast Asian country on the Eras Tour, angering neighbors. Via Y.
April 24. About the “Garden of the Generalissimos,” where the Taiwanese dumped their unwanted Chiang Kai-shek statues. Via L.
April 25. In the final negotiations of the Iran nuclear deal, when the Iranians said they wanted more, U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman burst out crying, which made them back off. Via L.
April 26. Essex Police has invested thousands of pounds in the past three years growing weed. Police can keep half the value of confiscated assets, but the problem is “when the police bust a cannabis farm, they often seize plants that have yet to fully mature… This is where Mr Hughes’s scheme comes in.” Via The Economist.
May 3. The U.S. would drop Budweiser to slow down the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. Via L.
May 4. Every horse in 2025 Kentucky Derby was a descendant of Secretariat. Via T.
May 7. Cardinal Dolan brought 12 packets of peanut butter to the papal conclave. “‘I think it’ll be longer than last time,’ he said, referring to the process that selected Pope Francis, which took two days. He said he had brought 12 packets of peanut butter, thinking that would be enough for him to eat three a day while sequestered. ‘So you figure that out,’ he said on the math.” Via The New York Times.
May 16. Wagering on the papal election was a popular pastime among all levels of society in sixteenth-century Rome. Via R.
June 1. At the peak of the bubble economy, Tokyo real estate could sell for as much as US$139,000 per square foot, which was nearly 350 times as much as equivalent space in Manhattan. By that reckoning, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth as much as the entire US state of California. Via S.
June 6. An estimated 60% to 90% of roads in India do not have names. For delivery directions, the median distance of “next to” is 80 meters. Via The Economist.
June 12. People inferred the range contraction of the Yangtze finless porpoise over the past 1400 years from mentions in classic Chinese poems. Via T.
June 13. “In early March, four Chinese engineers flew to Malaysia from Beijing, each carrying a suitcase packed with 15 hard drives. The drives contained 80 terabytes of spreadsheets, images and video clips for training an artificial-intelligence model.” (To escape export controls.) Via J.
June 16. The NHS was recently cited as the world’s largest purchaser of fax machines, with nearly 9,000 in use across the healthcare system. Via S.
June 17. There is a placebo pill in Britain called Obecalp (placebo spelled backwards). “Because Obecalp is classified as a dietary supplement and not a drug, manufacturers are not required to carry out their own clinical trials before putting it on the market but can rely on results from previous trials where a placebo has been used.” Via J.
June 26. It costs 26,000 rupees per day to park an F-35 in India. Via J.
July 1. 84% of all babies born in the City of London have either one or both parents who were born outside of the UK. Via M.
July 11. The U.S. bought titanium from the Soviets for the Blackbird. Via T.
July 20. Warren G. Harding invented the word “normalcy” (the correct word is normality). Via S.
July 23. Concorde was about 20% slower in Pepsi livery. Via K.
July 30. The world record for the World Snail Racing Championship is about 0.006mph. Via The Economist.
July 31. No one named their child ‘Keir’ in 2024. Via The Telegraph.
August 1. Google now spends more on capex than the entire UK defense budget. Via S.
August 4. Li Keqiang didn’t trust the official statistics, and himself instead looked at the railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and loans disbursed by banks. Via S.
August 6. During the first world war, Britain and Germany traded rubber for glass. Via A.
August 14. AB15 is the postcode with the most millionaires outside London. Via G.
August 15. “A great episode with canny former President Nixon: he flies to Moscow to meet with both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but they say they’re busy. So he has a loud conversation in his hotel lobby about a future meeting with Yeltsin. The KGB overhears, reports it back to Gorbachev, who suddenly finds time that very day to meet with Nixon. Nixon’s people then call Yeltsin’s people back and let them know that he’ll be meeting with Gorbachev, and Yeltsin’s people rush to schedule their own meeting.” Via S.
August 17. Genoa airport makes one exception to the 3 ounces of liquid rule for pesto, which goes through a special pesto scanner. Via J.
August 20. Sedona is named after one of its first residents (“Why don’t you name it after your wife?”). Via M.
August 24. When ships like the HMS Victory were about to go into battle, they would throw the furniture in officers’ cabins overboard and replace them with guns. Via the HMS Victory Museum in Portsmouth.
August 26. “If you want to travel in China the way its ever-growing middle class does, statistically speaking, that means you should skip the shiny symbol of modern technological achievement—the high-speed rail—in favor of the humble 20th-century automobile. During the 2025 Spring Festival, nearly 80% of the 900 million person-trips undertaken across the country were in automobiles” Via C.
August 29. Ok an old fact, really. A ton about cabin pressurization and humidity, which is why the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 feel so much better to fly on. Via R.
August 30. After 15 years, half the value of an aircraft is in its engines. Via the Deutsche Museum in Munich.
September 14. Gareth Edwards named the planet Scarif in Rogue One after a barista misspelled his name. Via this interview.
September 17. This year’s funeral of the Duchess of Kent was the first time a reigning monarch has attended Catholic Mass on UK soil since the Reformation. Via J.
September 19. Giant Tortoises didn’t get a scientific name for over 300 years due to the failure of delivery of specimens to Europe for classification due to their always being eaten on the way home, they were so delicious. Via Z.
September 23. About this incredible pigeon race scandal in China. “Pigeons have been clocked at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour for short stretches, and more than 80 miles an hour for hundreds of miles. Their speed and endurance have made it hard for people to cheat, even by smuggling a racing pigeon by car to a finish line. But China, where pigeon-racing remains popular, has been feverishly building a high-speed rail network, with trains that can travel nearly 200 miles an hour… The men had released the birds too soon, shattering records for the race. Driving from Shangqiu to Shanghai, a distance roughly equal to New York City to Raleigh, N.C., takes nearly eight hours, and racing pigeons usually take almost as long. But the bullet train takes as little as 3 hours 18 minutes. Via A.
September 24. Leeches have 10 stomachs, 32 brains, and 18 testicles. Via D.
September 25. Scotland’s name used to mean Ireland. Via K.
September 26. About James Flint, the first Englishman to travel inland to Canton to break Qing dynasty court protocol through a direct complaint to the Qianlong Emperor. He is the same guy who taught Ben Franklin how to make tofu, the earliest documented use of the word “tofu” in the English language. And so many other good facts like How Much Would You Need to be Paid to Live on a Deserted Island for 1.5 Years and Do Nothing but Kill Seals? All via Imperial Twilight.
October 5. “In the Middle Ages alehouses were so abundant that one Anglo-Saxon king attempted to place a limit on the number any one village could have. By 1870, Britain had some 115,000 pubs. But last year that number had fallen to 45,000, a new low.” Via The Economist.
October 7. Wide Parisian boulevards were built to better quell protests—to make building barricades harder and let troops move more quickly. Via A.
October 20. An octopus brain is donut-shaped. Via S.
October 30. If Rob Jetten becomes Dutch prime minister (who leads the party that just won October’s elections) and marries his fiance (Argentine field hockey player Nicolás Keenan), then both the Dutch Heads of State and Government will have Argentine spouses. Via R.
October 31. Wyoming is 3% larger than the U.K. Via S.
November 2. About Project Habakkuk, which aimed to build aircraft carriers out of giant icebergs. (They were called “bergships”; a prototype was built, using a special and effective “reinforced ice,” but proved impractical.) Via C.
November 4. In the Opium War, Chinese advisors thought to halt other Chinese rare exports. “Britons would die of constipation without rhubarb and tea from China” so would fold. Via A.
November 5. Vietnam is the second largest producer in the world of coffee. Via M. in the wonderful game of Chartle.
November 14. Biden was the first president not to launch a carrier (touched water) during his term since Kennedy, and before that it was Harding! Via lots of thinking from C, P, and S.
November 19. Boeing has patented using artillery to put out forest fires. Via R.
November 18. The Pokemon company puts in differently weighted useless cards in a pack to stop collectors from weighing the packs for good cards. Via H.
November 20. A federal judge knocked down a New York state law banning nunchucks in 2018 citing the Second Amendment. Via S.
November 23. 1/3 of all Stability AI traffic came from Japan back in 2022. Via S.
November 24. Hinkley Point C (set to be the most expensive nuclear plant ever built) spent £700m on fish protection, £280,000 per fish. Via H.
November 25. Regions hit harder by the Black Death are more democratic today. Via A.
November 26. The term “drastic” originally came into use in the late 1600s specifically to refer to laxatives. Via T.
November 29. About an old English sermon claiming, “And, if without Him there, if it be not Immanu-el, it will be Immanu-hell.” Via J from Oxford archives.
December 1. In Saudi Arabia, which led the original boycott against Coca-Cola, Pepsi’s market share is 70%. Coca-Cola’s market share in the West Bank is some 90%. Via The Economist.
December 2. US spending on aircraft alone reached 10% of 1939 GDP. Via A.
December 3. Walter White would not still cook meth in 2025. Via T.
December 11. About the Apple “divorce avoidance program.” So many Apple (most male) engineers were sent to China so often that their wives in the U.S. called themselves “Apple widows” and needed massive bonuses and extra days off to avoid divorce. Via Apple in China.
December 17. Paraguay is landlocked but has a navy. Via J.
December 21. A tiny Scottish island supplies the granite for all Winter Olympic curling stones. And Minnesota is supplying 100% of the U.S. Olympic curling teams in 2026. Via Amy Klobuchar.
A strong showing this year from the whole alphabet!