The Useless Facts-of-the-Week for 2023
Random esoterica I posted with my weekly updates.
Published in
8 min readJan 2, 2024
- Most of the time, Mercury is the closest planet to the Earth.
- In the French edition of Harry Potter, “Hufflepuff” is “Poufsouffle” (/poof’-soofl/).
- Investors who shorted Tesla made $11.5 billion dollars in 2022. (b/w/o TikTok)
- An efficient modern refrigerator uses less energy per hour than an old 60-watt lightbulb.
- “Happy Birthday” begins on its lowest note. When you sing it, plan accordingly.
- In one technical way, Jupiter does not orbit the sun. The planet is so massive that both planet and star orbit a shared “barycenter” that sits outside the sun’s surface.
- In simplified economic models, airlines have a strong incentive to make coach class kind of shitty.
It can’t be *too* shitty — then nobody would buy coach tickets.
But coach can’t be “vaguely tolerable”, either — then their (highly profitable) business travelers would buy (cheaper) coach tickets. - Sara Levy, a relatively obscure German performer, may be the reason we revere Bach today. She was a student of W. F. Bach, and passed the elder Bach’s music on to her young great-nephew Felix Mendelssohn, who in turn kicked off the “Bach revival”, rescuing the composer from obscurity, with an 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion. (b/w/o ‘jbaroquecello’ on TikTok)
- Utah will switch to a new flag in 2024. It has a beehive on it.
- Michelle Yeoh is a native English speaker. Like most Malaysians, she grew up speaking English and Malay — then when she got roles in Hong Kong, she had to get up to speed with Cantonese, and had to learn her (Mandarin) lines in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phonetically; apparently she handles that language much more confidently in Everything Everywhere All at Once. (One wonders if her first English-speaking roles were something of a relief, linguistically.)
- Todd Field, the renowned, Oscar-nominated writer/director of Tár, was also the co-creator of Big League Chew, the baseball-themed novelty bubble gum designed to resemble chewing tobacco. (He was also the pianist in Eyes Wide Shut.)
- Paul Rogers won the Oscar for film editing for Everything Everywhere All at Once. It was the third film he had ever edited.
- 10,000 years ago, no human being had blue eyes. No one is quite sure why the trait evolved.
- In France, Easter Eggs are not delivered by the Easter Bunny. Instead, all their church bells fly off to Rome, are blessed there, and return with colorful eggs that they (the bells) distribute to people’s backyards. (There is fanart.)
- Moderna, the mRNA-vaccine company behind one of the main COVID vaccines, was named as a portmanteau of “modified RNA” (which coincidentally produces “modern”).
- As of this writing, wikipedia’s “List of cetaceans” table lacks a picture for Deraniyagala’s beaked whale. The entry in the “Picture” column reads “[cetacean needed]”.
- A cup of warm water floating in a pot of boiling water will never itself boil. (h/t this TikTok)
- Bakithi Kumalo’s bass solo in “You Can Call Me Al” is actually *half* a bass solo, played forward and then reversed.
- The longest officially-recorded human pregnancy was 375 days, resulting in a successful childbirth in February 1945.
- American Express updated its slogan from “Don’t leave home without it” to “Don’t live life without it” in May 2018, which seems remarkably prescient in retrospect.
- An “algebraic” number is a number that could solve a normal-looking¹ equation.
2 is algebraic, because it could solve x-2=0.
√3 is algebraic, because it could solve x²-3=0.
If a number is *not* algebraic, it is “transcendental”.
π, the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference, is transcendental.
e, the base of the natural logarithms, is transcendental.
π + e, on the other hand, might be transcendental, and might not. Nobody knows. - When frequency doubles, the sound we perceive goes up one octave. This means that sheet music is more-or-less a log-scale graph of frequency over time.
- While St. Louis’s Gateway Arch may look like a parabola, it’s actually an inverted catenary, the shape a string takes on when it’s suspended between two anchor points.
- If you’ve ever watched a old cartoon with a dream sequence, it was probably introduced by a sound like this: an instrument (a vibraphone or maybe a harp) playing the “whole-tone scale”, which has six notes that are all separated by equal whole steps. The scale’s complete lack of a key center likely helps create that “floating away into a dream” feeling.
- The word “oil” ends with a so-called “dark L”. The sound is open enough that it’s actually close to the “oh” sound; this means that, audio-wise, “oil” is a palindrome: a recording played backwards still sounds like “oil”.
- In 2015, Ashley Madison, a dating site for extramarital affairs, claimed to have over 189,000 users from Ottawa. This was a bit suspect, as it would have implied that fully one-fifth of the city population was using the site (though Ottawans themselves seemed to take the factoid in stride). A subsequent massive data breach revealed that only about 1,200 Ottawans were on the site.
- Late in life, Steve Jobs, who was adopted as a child, connected with his biological sister, Mona Simpson. Shortly afterwards, Ms. Simpson married Simpsons writer Richard Appel, who eventually named Homer’s mother after Mona.
- At least going by the dates, Salvador Dalí could have gone to the movies to see Top Gun.
- The film adaptation of the Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was the last film role of silent-film star Buster Keaton.
- The 1899 song “Hello! Ma Baby!” (sung famously by Michigan J. Frog) was originally a novelty song about the new-fangled telephone and its newly-minted “hello” greeting.
- In English, you can use “already” in post-positional constructions like “Pet the cat already.” This “impatient already” is exactly how you’d use the equivalent word, “schon”, in German.
Did English pick up this quirk from German? No. Did both languages inherit it from proto-Germanic? Also no. Instead, English got this construction from Yiddish, which is itself a fusion of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
(b/w/o Understanding Linguistics) - The They Might Be Giants song “See the Constellation” uses an incomprehensible, clipped, shouted vocal sound as a near-constant drum sample.
That yelp comes from a countoff (“1, 2, 3, 4!”) from the 1977 Ramones track “Commando”. - The TMBG single “Birdhouse in Your Soul” runs 3 minutes 19 seconds. Wikipedia claims it has 18 key changes, though one can debate this.
- When Randall Munroe wrote What If?, his editors had to beg him not to include a SQL-injection attack (à la “Bobby Droptables”) in its title text (from this interview with Adam Conover).
- A female tomcat is a “molly”.
- Typically, butterflies don’t have cocoons. They instead use a “chrysalis”, which is made of chitin and (typically) hangs from a branch or the underside of a leaf. Most *moths* use “cocoons”, which are made of silk and are usually buried in soil or leaf piles.
- Leafcutter ants “stridulate” — that is, they rub two body parts together and make a chirping sound like a cricket. One side effect of the “chirp” is that vibrates their leaf-cutting mandibles, which makes them cut more effectively. (source)
- “Andragogy” is the proper term for “pedagogy, applied to adults”.
- Norwegians use the word “texas” to mean “crazy”.
- Cephalotes atratus is a tropical ant species that nests in the treetops. When they fall off a branch, they can arrange their legs so they do a controlled glide back to the trunk of their tree.
- I’ve mentioned before that sharks are older than trees. They are also about six times older than Polaris, AKA the North Star. Not just older than the star’s current position: older than the star itself.
- If there are two things we know about armadillos, it’s “they can curl into a ball” and “they can carry leprosy”. But only one species — the three-banded armadillo — curls into a ball. And only one species — the nine-banded armadillo — can carry leprosy. A third species, the ‘screaming hairy armadillo’, does neither — it just screams, adorably. (b/w/o this video, h/t Marc Majcher)
- If you’re a doctor in the United States and you help out in an emergency, you’re protected from lawsuits by so-called “Good Samaritan” laws . However, those laws only kick in if you don’t receive compensation. A surprising result: if you save someone’s life on a flight, and then accept (say) an upgrade to first class, you just opened yourself up to possible litigation.
- In 1833, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and told the attendees they should call themselves something other than “natural philosophers”, since, unlike “philosophers” who sat and dreamed up fascinating ideas, these people tended to go out and do grubby things like gather bugs and run experiments.
William Whewell (pronounced “Hugh-ull”) ran with Coleridge’s idea, and thought that science should be analogous to art: if someone who creates art is an “artist”, then perhaps someone who advances science should be called a “scientist”.
He published this coinage in March of 1834, four months before Mr. Coleridge passed away.
(Among Mr. Whewell’s many other wordsmithing credits: “electrode”, “linguistics”, “physicist”, and “astigmatism”.) - The common raven is the world’s largest songbird.
- In 2022, mathematicians cracked one of the ciphers employed by the Zodiac Killer in the late 1960s. It was tricky because the code included both homophonic substitution — i.e., each letter corresponds to multiple possible symbols — and transposition — i.e., there’s a consistent rule for rearranging the letters after they’re enciphered.
- Henry Kissinger’s obituary in The New York Times was co-written by Michael T. Kaufman, a renowned journalist who died of pancreatic cancer in early 2010.
So, yes, Henry Kissinger lived so long that he Henry outlived one of his obituary writers by almost fourteen years.
(Mr. Kaufman also helped “ghost-write” Osama bin Laden’s obit in 2011.) - Herbert Hoover is the only US president (so far) who could speak Mandarin Chinese (albeit not fluently), which he picked up as a mining engineer in Tianjin
- This is a Venn Diagram, a 2D diagram that uses three circles to show all their possible intersections.
It is mathematically impossible to do that with four circles. (But there are other approaches, such as using ellipses instead.) - If you received all the gifts from “The Twelve Days of Christmas” you would have a total of 364 presents — so unless next year is a leap year, that’s a gift for every single day until *next* Christmas.
(Mathematically speaking, the number of gifts you receive in “the N days of Christmas” is the nth “tetrahedral number”: n*(n+1)*(n+2)/6.)
[repeating an oldie but a goodie from 2016] - Following up on last week’s fact: 2024 is the 22ⁿᵈ “tetrahedral number”; ergo, if there were *22* days of Christmas instead of 12, you’d get 2024 presents total.
