Things I learned in 2024

Pisgah National Forrest, North Carolina, USA. My favorite place I visited in 2024.

I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2024 version here. I didn’t make it to 52 things this year, but I stayed curious.

My 2024 highlights: My third child and second daughter was born. I helped Macro Oceans scale a regenerative kelp economy and received an Emergent Ventures grant for my work on HeyRecap, a local news AI experiment.

Here are the things I learned along the way:

  1. Transplant recipients can inherit memories from their donors — Adaobi Adibe
  2. The March 2011 earthquake in Japan was so strong that it shortened the length of a day — Earth Sky via my friend Graham
  3. Plants probably have memories. “On one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.” — Scientific American via The Browser
  4. US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years — Melissa Lott
  5. A banana contains the same amount of radiation that a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year — New York Times via Jim Pethokoukis
  6. Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkenness — Upworthy
  7. 78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990 — Can’t Get Much Higher
  8. Lebron and Bronny James are the highest scoring father and son duo in NBA history without Bronny ever scoring a point — @georgemikan
  9. There are more deaths from alcohol in the US each year than all illicit drugs combined — Charles Fain Lehman
  10. France last used the guillotine to put someone to death in 1977 — The Rest Is History
  11. The Barnum effect is when people give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their own personality that are in fact general enough to apply to a wide range of people — Simon Wilson
  12. Predator-prey models have two stable equilibria: one where predator and prey are in approximate balance and the other where both are extinct — Paul Kedrosky
  13. A correction from my 2023 things I learned: working moms today probably do not spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms did in 1960 — Lyman Stone
  14. “Soccer” as a word for the game of football came from the English, not Americans — Duolingo
  15. Quantity precedes quality. Students graded on the quantity of the art they produce make higher quality art than students graded on the quality of art they produce — Perhaps apocryphal via Austin Kleon
  16. Jalapeño peppers are getting less spicy over time —D Magazine via my friend Mark
  17. Electrons within gold atoms are moving at 58% the speed of light — Will Kinney
  18. Lake Superior is about the size of the state of Alabama — Wikipedia
  19. The Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year — Quanta Magazine
  20. No one’s name was changed at Ellis Island; then, as now, names were printed on tickets. — Rosemary Meszaros and Katherine Pennavaria via Marginal Revolution
  21. The increase in driving due to 9/11 led to ~1600 more traffic deaths than otherwise would’ve been expected — David Epstein
  22. A correction to my 2022 list: Men whose wives are diagnosed with a terminal illness are not significantly more likely to get divorced — Retraction Watch
  23. In 1990, 5% of Americans had a passport; today that number is 48% — Devon Zuegel
  24. Fernet Branca uses 75% of the world’s saffron — Eater
  25. Making TB medicine sweet rather than bitter reduced a child’s risk of developing multi-drug resistant TB by over 50% — Bloomberg via News Minimalist
  26. More than 50% of US couples now meet each online — Eric Klineberg
  27. The Eiffel Tower’s lighting is protected by copyright — Tour Eiffel

If you think we’d have an interesting conversation about kelp, local news, our anything else, send me an email (jdilla.xyz@gmail.com). I’d love to meet you!

Prior lists: 2023, 2022, 2021

things i learned

2024-12-04