Things I Learned - March 2025
Greetings from London, UK. Here is this March’s edition of Things I Learned. Plus, the usual set of addenda…
Things I Learned
The tendency of women to live longer than men is true in most mammals, not just humans. (source)
The word “daily” in the Lord’s prayer (”give us today our daily bread”) is a guess as to what the Greek word epiousion (ἐπιούσιον) means, since the word appears nowhere else. (source)
The first president whose voice we have a recording of is Benjamin Harrison, in 1889 (recording here). (h/t)
Lemons don’t exist naturally. They are a hybrid of a bitter orange and a citron, created through crossbreeding, and first brought to Europe around 200 AD. (h/t, source)
In its initial years, basketball had no dribbling; players would only pass the ball from a standing position. Dribbling only arose in 1897 when the Yale basketball team noticed that the rules only said you could not run while “holding” the ball, and proceeded to exploit this loophole. (source)
The verb ‘to don’, as in ‘to wear’, is a contraction of ‘to do on’, and the verb ‘to doff’, as in ‘to doff a cap’, is a contraction of ‘to do off’. (source)
Lie-flat business class did not exist until March, 2000 when the first such seat was unveiled by British Airways on it’s London-NYC route. (source)
A President’s first year address to Congress is not called the “State of the Union”, since the President has not been in office long enough to have real updates. Instead, the first year address is called the “Year One Joint Session Address”. (source)
Only male narwhals have tusks. (source)
In medieval Europe, Paradise was usually regarded as a place in Asia that exerted an influence on neighboring territories, rendering them unusually rich in gold, jewels, and spices. (source)
South Carolina still executes convicts on death penalty by firing squad. (source)
Carcinization is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans independently evolve to look like crabs (i.e., it is the tendency of nature to keep “reinventing” crabs). (source)
The reason there is a dot on the letter “i” was to avoid confusion back in the days when m was written “ııı” and n was written “ıı. (source)
The downward sloping relationship between income and weight in developed countries — i.e. that wealthier individuals tend to have lower rates of obesity — is almost entirely driven by women. In most developed countries, the relationship between income and wealth is flat or even upward sloping for men. (source)
Articles I Found Interesting
Graphs I Liked
Not quite a graph, but I learned that early in his career Dr. Seuss did a painting of the abduction of the Sabine women (8th century BC). (h/t)
Most popular meats consumed, a chimera chart
Since I think this is my first ever(?) Things I Learned where I did not have one finance/economics fact, I feel the need to throw in at least one chart. I’m accustomed to thinking of stock returns as fairly normally distributed, but it seems they’re fairly skewed.
Some shameless self-promotion here, but I was proud to have this graph I made on tennis longevity featured in a popular tennis blog I follow. (I also made an interactive/dynamic version).1
Finally…
As I announced in the previous newsletter, my big personal (professional?) news this past month was moving to London to start as the Marjorie Deane fellow at The Economist2, writing about business, economics, finance, etc. So far I’ve had one short article published, and I’m now working on a longer, more exciting (for me, at least) one. I’m always eager to hear (a) ideas for articles (b) London suggestions, so please please send them my way if you have any. As always, feel free to get in touch.
Anyway, London is an interesting place. I’ve been mentally collecting a bunch of observations about British culture/society; at some point I’ll probably write them up.
I can’t get you a free subscription but I may be able to get you a discount.