Always Interesting: “52 Things I Learned in 2024”
Tom Whitwell just sent along his annual list of the 52 things he’s learned in the past year. As usual, there’s lots of fascinating things in there…here are some of my favorites:
3. There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene. [Via Gabrielle E. Brill]
9. Medellin in Colombia has cut urban temperatures by 2°C in three years by planting trees. [Peter Yeung]
14. In early 1980s San Francisco, several seat-slashing gangs operated on the BART transit system, deliberately generating extra fees and overtime payments for repairs. They’d use specific cutting patterns so the repair teams would know who to pay for the favour. [Dianne de Guzman, via Russell Davies]
24. If you drop a normal hair dryer into a fish tank full of tap water, it will carry on working, gently warming up the water. (NB Please do not try this.) [JD Stillwater]
38. Between 1926 and 1934, the average life-span of a light bulb fell from 1,800 hours to 1,200 hours, because a global cartel of lightbulb manufacturers fined anyone who made a longer-lasting bulb. [Markus Krajewski]
49. To avoid radio jamming, some Russian drones in Ukraine now trail a 10km long spool of super fine fibre optic cable behind them for steering and communication. [David Hambling]
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