Things I Learned - April 2024

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Happy May Day! Before jumping into this month’s “Things I Learned”, I wanted to make a plug for a new monthly newsletter I’m starting with a colleague, called Better Know a Dataset (BKAD). You can find out more about it (and subscribe) here. But if you generally enjoy reading this blog, you’ll probably enjoy BKAD as well. The first post is coming this Friday.

Things I learned this month:

1. In the US, the ratio of eggs laid for eating vs. eggs laid for creating new chickens is roughly 7:1. (cite)

2. Neckties originated from Croatian mercenaries. (cite)

3. There are just four countries in the world with cheaper stamps than the United States. (cite)

4. Martingale processes in statistics are named after the martingale betting strategy (in which you keep going double-or-nothing until you eventually win)... which is itself named after a town in France (Martigues) whose inhabitants were noted for being particularly naive and stupid. (cite)

5. In the US, 87% of firms with revenue greater than $100M are private. (cite)

6. A knocker-upper was a profession in Netherlands, Britain, and Ireland, whose job was to travel around the town and rouse sleeping people they could get to work on time (cite).

7. A full-size NBA basketball court can fit inside a soccer penalty box (cite)

8. The majority of gun deaths in the US are suicides (cite).

9. The Pharaoh to which the Exodus story refers is most likely Rameses II, the same Pharaoh about whom the poem Ozymandias is written. (I also learned the name Ozymandias is a Greek transliteration of Rameses’ throne name, Usermaatre). (cite)

10. Adults buying legos for themselves constitute a fifth of Lego’s sales. (cite)

11. Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to have held a patent. (cite

12. 72%(!!) of the US stock market is held in accounts that do not have to pay any taxes. (cite)

13. Dom Perignon was a monk. (cite)

14. In the US, there is only a single new car model (the Mitsubishi Mirage) that sells for less than $20,000. (cite)

15. Of the 50 largest airports in the US, only three have been built in the last 50 years. (cite)

16. For individuals above 7 feet tall, the chances of landing in the NBA are 1 in 6 (cite).

17. Pigeons are one of three milk producing birds. (cite)

18. The US built more than 100 aircraft carriers during World War II. (cite and cite)

19. According to the founder, the name Lululemon means nothing, but was purposefully created “to have many 'L’s so that it would sound western to Japanese buyers, who often have difficulty pronouncing the letter.” (cite)

20. The top wealth creating stock — i.e. returns times the total amount invested — over the past decade was Apple. The top wealth destroying stock was General Electric. (cite)

Graphs I Liked

• I read a very interesting article on the difficulty in building airports. One striking fact was just how large a reduction there has been in the noise emissions from aircraft. The graph below puts it into perspective: planes were orders of magnitude louder in the past than today. Also, there is a bizarre SCOTUS case (United States v. Causby) about aircraft noise that dates to “a 1946 case in which low-flying military jets caused a farmer's chickens to kill themselves as they ran into the walls in fright”.

• Household Savings, A Pandemic Story:

• A Slate cheat sheet of ME dynamics

• What’s going on with Italy?

• Finally, please take a minute to read my cousin’s WSJ Op-Ed on the rise of sport’s betting and what can be done about it.