Things I Learned - October 2023

💡 This is October’s edition of “Things I Learned”. In addition to the standard set of facts, there is a cool set of images at the end.

Things I Learned

1. There is a city in Alaska named Unalaska. (cite)

2. 22% of the world's fresh surface water is held in Lake Baikal (cite)

3. Turkish Airlines flies to more countries than any other airline in the world. (cite)

4. If you had invested in the stock market from 1960-1980 and beaten the market by 5% each year, you would have made less money than if you had invested from 1980-2000 and underperformed the market by 5% a year (cite).

5. The construction of coins in Ancient Sparta involved dipping them in vinegar, so as to make them too brittle for non-currency uses (e.g. tools, transport). (cite)

6. The largest church on earth — larger than Saint Peter’s Basilica — is located in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast, a city with population 212,000. (cite)

7. The only MLB team that owns its own plane is the Detroit Tigers (cite)

8. In 1957, Ghana had the same per capita income as South Korea (cite)

9. Half of all publicly traded firms are unprofitable. (cite)

10. Every number of the form ababab (e.g. 464646) is divisible by 37 (cite).

11. Sharks are older than the north star. (cite)

12. 40% of Native Americans reported voting for Republicans in 2022. (cite)

13. Half of the world’s cashews are sold by Costco (cite).

14. Real median net worth for U.S. households was up 37% from 2019-2022. This is the biggest increase in 30 years. (cite)

15. The origins of why “Friday the 13th” is considered unlucky is not known. The leading theories are (1) a Norse myth in which Loki shows up unannounced as the thirteenth guest to a party (2) Tarot cards in which the card numbered 13 often has Death on it. (cite)

16. There are more ETFs than stocks. (cite)

17. Tom Brady, better known for his NFL career, was drafted by the Montreal Expos in the 1995 MLB Draft (cite).

18. There have only been 46 presidents, and nine of them (nearly 20 percent) took office due to the death or resignation of a predecessor. (cite)

19. The “Big Three” asset managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — collectively own 17% of the US equity market. (cite)

20. Google searches for “inequality” are twice as high during the academic year as during the summer. (cite)

21. At the time the partnership was dissolved, Yeezy’s — Kanye’s fashion collaboration with Adidas — accounted for 8% of Adidas’ revenues. (cite)

22. In the production of canned tuna fish, the tuna is cooked after it is canned (cite)

23. Wyoming consistently has the highest suicide rate of any state. (cite)

24. P.T. Barnum, the famous American showman behind Barnum & Bailey circuses, was a major donor to and trustee of Tufts University. The school’s elephant mascot (the Jumbos) is in his honor, and its natural history museum carries his name. (cite)

(In lieu of) “Graphs I liked”:

In lieu of the standard “graphs I liked” segment of this newsletter, I instead wanted to show some experimentation I’ve done with DALL-E3, OpenAI’s new image generative AI. It’s actually quite astounding how incredible it is, I’m more impressed by it than I am by ChatGPT. Here are some of my favorite examples “I’ve” “created”.

• Hyperrealistic baseball stadiums. I asked AI to create hyper-realistic baseball stadiums that play heavily on the team name. Below are two of my favorites (Arizona Diamondbacks, Kansas City Royals). You can see every team’s stadium here.

  

  

• Literary Iconography: I asked DALLE3 to produce an image corresponding to first, Percy Bysse Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, and second, the Nietzsche phrase “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”

  

  “…My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings”

  

  When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

• Logo Generation: My good friend produces honey from his house, and operates under the name Orchard Hill Honey. I thought it would be nice to have DALLE3 generate a logo for his company. Note how DALLE3 explains its choices:

  

• My resume: Finally, I fed DALLE3 my resume (copy pasted it), and asked it to generate an image. These are some of the results: