Rings for sale in the Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, November 2024

52 things I learned in 2024

This year I took a sabbatical, recorded a podcast with Freakonomics, designed and shipped a tiny modular synthesiser, and learned many learnings.

1. To highlight tax evasion, South Korea introduced ugly neon green number plates for company cars worth more than $58,000. Luxury car sales fell 27%. [Song Jung-a]
2. If you run one specific, but illegal, database query on a set of widely used health data, you can access Tony Blair’s entire personal medical history. [Ben Goldacre]
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]
4. Film studios now add CGI effects to behind the scenes footage to hide how much CGI has been used to make the film. [Jonas Ussing]
5. Casio sells a premium desk calculator called the S100X-BK. It has exactly the same functions as a normal calculator but is handmade in Japan from milled aluminium. It costs £359.99. [darkhorse_log]
6. The London Underground has a distinct form of mosquito, Culex pipiens f. Molestus, genetically different from above-ground mosquitos, and present since at least the 1940s. [Katharine Byrne & Richard A Nichols]
7. Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. [Scott Alexander]
8. When writing a sentence, don’t keep your reader waiting. [David Crystal via The Browser]
9. Medellin in Colombia has cut urban temperatures by 2°C in three years by planting trees. [Peter Yeung]
10. In China, there are a registries of haunted apartments. If you’re willing to live somewhere with a sinister history, you can get a discount of 30%. [Andrew Kipnis]
11. And before buying a web domain name, you should definitely check if it is haunted or cursed. [Bryan Braun]
12. After 100 years of work, Egypt is now officially free of malaria, the disease that killed Tutankhamen. [Jaroslav Lukiv]
13. Powerful showers are more energy efficient and more water efficient than weak showers. [Ian Walker]
14. In early 1980s San Francisco, several seat-slashing gangs operated on the BART transist 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]
15. After security at Milwaukee airport there is a ‘Recombobulation Area’ for people who have been discombobulated by the security experience. [Molly Snyder via Nick Parker]
16. Metropolitan Police have been using aircraft since the 1930s. The Battle of Cable Street in 1936 was patrolled by an early helicopter. [Matt Brown]
17. The Telugu-language action film Devara: Part 1 made more money ($5.5m) in US cinemas than Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m Megalopolis in its first week ($5m). [Pamela McClintock]
18. In October, a shipment of 22 tonnes of cheese was stolen in London. It may have ended up in Russia where there is a sanctions-busting black market in luxury food. [Dan Saladino]
19. Avatar Robot Cafe Dawn in Tokyo is staffed by robot waiters that are remotely controlled by workers with disabilities working from home. [Yuji Semba]
20. Tabloid is a programming language based on clickbait headlines: “Every program must end with PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE, because you have to grow your audience” [Linus]
21. In 2022, 55% of Macy’s income came from credit cards rather than retail sales. That’s fairly normal for US department stores. [Pan Kwan Yuk]
22. In Mongolia, people rave on horseback. [Hwang So-hee]
23. Floating or swimming to work is becoming more popular in Bern, Switzerland (and also Basel) [Bill Harby via Nick Bennett]
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]
25. Millions of free bikes have been given to children in rural India, doubling the number of girls cycling to school, increasing attendance and reducing dropouts. [Rachita Vora]
26. Photographs of sporting events in the 1960–70s have a blue haze in the background that’s absent in modern photos. It’s because everyone was smoking in the arena. [Allen Murabayashi]
27. On 30 September 2024, the UK became the first major economy to completely stop generating power by burning coal. [Molly Lempriere and Simon Evans]
28. Qoobo is a robotic pillow with a tail: “Certain parts of us are wired to want to pet something furry with a heartbeat — both boxes this strange little robot happily checks” [Brian Heater]
29. You can buy 200 real human molars for $900. [B for Bones, via Lauren]
30. Each branch of the British restaurant chain Dishoom has its own 50-page background story: “The fictional proprietor of our new restaurant may have views on the politics of the time, or perhaps specific tastes in art and literature.” [Shamil and Kavi Thakrar see p. 572]
31. An autophage rocket uses its own plastic fuselage as fuel [Patrick Harkness]
32. In 1800, 1 in 3 people on earth were Chinese. Today, it’s less than 1 in 5. [Our World in Data, via Boyan Slat]
33. In the US, table saws are responsible for around 4,300 amputations per year. All other products are responsible for 3,600 amputations per year combined. [Ben Blatt]
34. Your bathroom tiles might have neanderthal body parts embedded in them. [John Hawks]
35. People whose surnames start with U, V, W, X, Y or Z tend to get grades 0.6% lower than people with A-to-E surnames. Modern learning management systems sort papers alphabetically before they’re marked, so those at the bottom are always seen last, by tired, grumpy markers. A few teachers flip the default setting and mark Z to A, and their results are reversed. [Jill Barshay]
36. A random and moderately photogenic tree in a vacant roadside lot in Luang Prabang, northern Laos, has become a tourist destination since being featured on the Chinese super app Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book). [Zhaoyin Feng]
37. In Europe, the number of people who had strokes caused by air pollution fell 25% between 2010 and 2019. [Sarah Neville]
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]
39. Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta hired a team of professional pickpockets to steal phones and wallets from his players at a dinner, to teach the squad the importance of being ready, alert and prepared at all times. [James McNicholas]
40. Women who wear headscarves are sometimes at risk of inhaling the pins: “A distinct group of patients has recently been recognized among Muslim nations… women who wear headscarves and place the scarf pin in their mouth prior to securing the veils, leading to accidental foreign body aspiration.” [Aram Baram & co, via Kameelah Janan Rasheed]
41. Ultrashort dramas — 10-15 minute shows with titles like Flash Marriage Partner is a Magnate, The Security Guard is a Trillionaire, and 50-Year-Old Me Got Pregnant by a 20-Year-Old Rich Guy have become very popular among older viewers in China. Actors in their 40s are asked to play characters in their 70s, and addicted viewers are being sent pay-per-view bills of 9000 yuan (£900) [Meng Qian]
42. In the 2020s, over 16% of movies have colons in the title (Like Spider-Man: Homecoming), up almost 300% since the 1990s. [Daniel Parris]
43. Technicians in Taiwan believe that a particular brand of crisps (Kuaikuai (乖乖), coconut butter-flavour) is a good luck charm for technology, preventing computer failures. Packets of Kuaikuai were piled around a model of the Falcon 9 rocket which carried Taiwan’s first domestically developed satellite into orbit. [Noah Buchan]
44. Takkyu-bin is a super convenient Japanese luggage forwarding service. For $13 you can ship heavy suitcases between hotels or airports, so you never need to carry your bags. Why doesn’t every country have this? [Craig Mod]
45. Ozempic seems to be changing the second hand clothes market, creating a surge in plus-size women’s apparel sales. Size 3XL listings have doubled over the last two years [Jessica Binns]
46. Between the 1920s and 1950s, millions of ‘enemies of the people’ — often educated elites — were sent to prison camps in the Soviet Union. Today, the areas around those camps are more prosperous and productive than similar areas. [Toews & Vézina]
47. In 2024, around 10% of Anguilla’s GDP will come from fees for its .ai domain name. [Benj Edwards]
48. Some languages have only three named colours: red, black and white. So green is black, blue is also black, yellow is red. [Marco Giancotti]
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]
50. You shouldn’t say ‘hello’ in chat. [NoHello.net]
51. South Korea has 1,012 robots per 10,000 employees, the highest in the world. This year China overtook Germany and Japan. With 470 robots per 10k employees, China’s robot density has doubled in four years. [Michael Ouellette]
52. Halal Beats is a British company that sells music made using only vocal sounds, without any instruments, for Muslim video makers and influencers who don’t want to use instrumental music in their content. [Umar Valu]

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Tom Whitwell designs open source music electronics as Music Thing Modular, is objectively interesting, and helps companies solve big problems, tell stories and build better products. He’s previously worked with Magnetic, The Times, The Economist, Condé Nast, Mars, Innovate UK, National Grid, Energy Systems Catapult and Channel 4. Say hello: tom.whitwell@gmail.com