Things I Learned - September 2024
💡 Welcome back to this month’s1 edition of Things I Learned.
Things I learned
The founding date of the University of Oxford is unknown (source)
The prime launch angle to shoot a shotput is 36-38 degrees. The prime launch angle to hit a home run is 28-30 degrees (source and source)
James Madison was the last president to personally lead troops into battle in his role as Commander In Chief.
In the US, 34% of husbands and wives are within 1 year of each other. Just 14% of wives are more than 1 year older than their husbands. (source)
Philippa Foot, the influential contemporary philosopher who first proposed the trolley problem, was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland (source)
One penny costs more than three pennies to make and distribute (source)
The word “ok” originated as a comical mispelling of “oll korrect” (all correct). (source)
The US Government pays $3 billion per day in interest expenses (source)
There are a total of two escalators in Wyoming (source).
Sales of the “honey deuce” drink — a beverage sold only at the US Open — account for 2% of all annual revenue made by the United States Tennis Association (source)
Humpty dumpy is never explicitly described as being an egg. (source)
Kareem Adbul-Jabbar, the player with the second most points of any NBA player in history, made a total of one three-point shot in his career. (source)
Wampum shells — beads made from shell of quahog clams — were legal tender in America and were used as currency for more than 100 years (source).
The title “Your Majesty” is typically reserved for the King or Queen; “Your Highness” is reserved for additional members of the royal family (e.g. prince/princesses). (source).
Reflections on the Previous Blog Post
I always appreciate feedback from my readers, including — as last month — when a number of readers reached out after last month’s blog post to offer corrections on some of the facts. To formally correct the record:
A panenka is not any kick to the center of a goal (as I had written), but rather a specific type of kick where the ball is chipped quite softly to the center. (I also learned that there a number of eponymous soccer goals including a Trivela (when you bend it with the outside of your foot mimicking the effect of when you’d curl it with the opposite foot) and an Olimpico (goal directly off of a corner kick)/
The purple dye after which Phoenicia is named does not come from the shell of the murex snail (as I had written) but in fact come from the mucus membrane and glands.
In my last post, I offered some thoughts on how to properly weight olympic medal counts based on the monetary compensation various countries offer to their athletes. A number of readers reached out with some suggestions of alternate ways to weight gold, silver, and bronze medals. One suggested a modification of my approach: rather than equally-weighting the amount each country awards for a medal, we should weight each country by the frequency with which that country actually pays out the award (the idea here is that it doesn’t matter if you offer your citizens a large amount of money for gold if, in equilibrium, you never pay it out!). Another reader suggested weighting by the cost of the raw material to produce the medals (i.e. since gold is more valuable than silver than bronze; the original idea for the medal types). Another idea is to weight by the relative frequency with which people search for the respective terms “gold medal”, “silver medal”, and “bronze medal” (to capture general popularity). Finally, there was a discussion on Twitter that suggested weighting by which medals best predict future performance. A short comparison of some of these schemes is given below (I omit showing the materials cost since the weights are so ridiculously high — 223 and 116 for gold and silver compared to bronze).
In any case, none of this really matters, since by any weighting scheme, the US won the Olympics.
Graphs I Liked
Top Employers of Yale Graduates, 2014-2024
Note: I’m biased since I made this graph, you can read the full associated post here.
Number of Active US podcasts
Air Conditioning By Country
Apologies for the hiatus last month, during which I was working on my dissertation.