36 Interesting Things I Learned

Inspired by Jason Kottke’s post “52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023” I started keeping a similar list. Somewhere along the way I lost the habit and didn’t make it through the year. Anyway, here are 36 things that I think are pretty interesting.

1. When you think of bromeliads, you might think of Medicine Man, the 1992 film starring Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco. It turns out that the Bromeliaceae family comprises over 3,700 species of plants, including the pineapple.🍍

2. According to Nicholas Ward, the abacus emoji on Apple devices shows the number 1976, the year of the company’s founding. 🧮

3. There are no “baby” birds. (The term generally only applies to mammals.) The life stages of birds are: hatchling, chick, fledgeling, juvenile, and adult.

4. All sea lions are seals (or more precisely, pinnipeds) but not all seals are sea lions.

5. I had heard of Michelin stars, but actually looked up their meaning:

   • One star: Cuisine de qualité, mérite une halte (High-quality cooking, worth a stop)
   • Two stars: Cuisine excellente, mérite un détour (Excellent cooking, worth a detour)
   • Three stars: Une des meilleures cuisine, vaut le voyage (Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey)

6. According to Wikipedia the maximum size of a PDF document (a limit imposed by Adobe Acrobat and not the format itself) is 15 million inches square, or 145,161 km². That’s a little bit bigger than Tajikistan (144,100 km²) and just a little smaller than Montana (147,040 km²).

7. When we think of the Galápagos Islands the word biodiversity may come to mind. In reality, the archipelago has very low biodiversity—that is, relatively few distinct species are found there. There are, however, quite a few species that are not found anywhere else.

8. There is a cute rhyme (one of several variations) for remembering metric temperatures:

0 is freezing

10 is not

20 is pleasing

30 is hot

9. A corvette is a type of warship.

10. The world’s tallest tree is a coast redwood in California called Hyperion, and stands 380 feet tall.

11. A “hob” is a range or cooktop. This will undoubtedly sound silly to many readers, but I’d never heard this word before.

12. The county of Merseyside (in England), which includes Liverpool, has a LOT of pubs. The Merseyside Pub Guide , lovingly curated by Phil Wieland, lists 1,982. That seems like a lot.

13. There are pink pelicans! (source)

14. In the US military, F-16 fighters are generally flown only by the Air Force. Similarly, F-14s and (more recently) F/A-18s are flown by the Navy. (I learned this after I remarked to a Navy veteran that I had seen some F-14s flying from a nearby Air Force base.)

15. There has never been a US president who was an only child—i.e. had no siblings.

16. The Lattice Method is how Japanese kids learn to multiply two numbers. (I need to learn this too.)

17. Tylenol helps with emotional pain too.

18. While hiking near Mount Rainier (in July, btw) I learned that snow bridges can be quite dangerous.

19. The number of a CR battery indicates its diameter and thickness . For example, CR2032 is 20 mm wide and 3.2 mm thick. (Thanks to Marco for this bit of wisdom.)

20. Blind Soccer is a thing. USA Blind Soccer Men's National Team will compete for the first time in the 2028 Paralympic Games in LA.

21. The Strawberry Tree is a fruit tree native to Europe.

22. A quine is a computer program that takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. This came up when someone on Mastodon shared this link to a quine clock.

23. Pawpaws are fruits that grow natively in Ohio. They are said to taste like banana, mango, and pineapple. I’ve never actually tried them though.

24. The puzzle piece as a symbol of autism has been controversial, so the infinity sign was introduced a few years ago as an alternative. I first learned about this from a social media post.

25. There is a unicode character for the minus sign (−) U+2212 that looks a lot like, but is different to, the en dash (–) U+2013.

26. The Caesar Salad was invented in Mexico.

27. The four-letter Hebrew-language word יהוה ‎ (transliterated as YHWH and sometimes written as Yahweh or Jehovah—is called the Tetragrammaton.

28. The word etiology. There are etiological stories in the Bible, such as the story of Lot’s wife. She is turned into a pillar of salt in order to explain the existence of salt pillars in the vicinity of the Dead Sea.

29. Vickrey auctions encourage truthful bidding.

30. Those things on the tops of buildings we call gargoyles often aren’t. They’re called grotesques, although the terms are often conflated. (Gargoyles spew water.)

31. The [Baby] Boomer generation is split into two groups, Boomer I (1946–54) and Boomer II (1955–64). The latter group is called Generation Jones.

32. Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in both the Western and Southern Hemispheres, is only the 189th tallest mountain in the world.

33. Chippy Tea has nothing to do with tea.

34. Annatto is used to make cheddar cheese yellow. As I understand it all cheddar cheese is white in the UK.

35. An anticyclone is an area of high pressure caused by sinking air. Anticyclones are characterized by few or no clouds and light winds. Heat domes are the result of summer anticyclones. Cyclones, or depressions (areas of low pressure) are the opposite of anticyclones.

36. Fount—as in “fount of knowledge”—is spelled “fount” not “font” even though it is pronounced like the latter.