Things I Learned - June 2024

💡 This is June’s edition of “Things I Learned”.

Things I Learned

1. Denver Airport sees more passengers a year than JFK Airport (source).

2. The first commercial item ever to be scanned by barcode was a pack of juicy fruit gum. (source)

3. The Kalenjin tribes of Kenya are roughly 0.08% of the world’s population, but account for more than 40% of all World Championship and Olympic medals in running distances >800M. (source, h/t).

4. The record of peasant revolts from 1500-1910 is 1 win, 6 draws, 71 losses (source, h/t)

5. The New York Mets have never produced an MVP. (source)

6. Approximately 61% of U.S. boat owners have an annual household income of $75,000 or less (source)

7. Dr. Pepper is older than Coca Cola or Pepsi (source).

8. The National Bank Act of 1864 required banks to include the word “national” in their names and encouraged them to bear numbers, hence the similarity in a lot of bank names today. (source, h/t)

9. Dwile flonking is a British pub game (source).

10. In 1970, the average woman had 4.83 kids (source).

11. Honolulu’s TheBus is the nation's most heavily used public transportation system per capita among major cities. (source)

12. Nowhere in the New Testament does it specify the number of wise men who visited Jesus. (source)

13. Of the 7 largest publicly traded companies in the world — Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Saudi Aramco, and Meta — only Saudi Aramco was founded in San Francisco (source, h/t)

14. The CEO of Delta took his first flight at age 25 (source)

15. The national sport of Afghanistan, Buzkashi, involves players riding around on horseback in an effort to put a goat carcass in a goal. (source)

16. Algorithms were invented in 825 AD by Muhammad Algorithm (source, h/t).¹

17. The reason that hedge funds charge 20% of profits is because the founder of the first hedge fund, Alfred Winslow Jones, noted that Phoenician sea captains kept a fifth of the profits from successful voyages” (source)

18. Excluding mergers, just one of the largest 40 companies in Europe (by market cap) was founded in the last 40 years.

Graphs I Liked

• Map of where every North American player in NHL history was born.

  

• Labelled natural phenomena

  

• The alphabetically sorted numbers in various languages

  

• Inconsistencies in Chipotle bowl sizes

  

Finally

• Congrats to my brother and his wife on their marriage!

1. Strictly speaking “Algorithm” is the latinization of Al-Khwarizmi.