52 interesting things I learned in 2024

Inspired by Jason Kottke’s annual list, I kept track of some things I learned this year, one for each week. Here we go:

1. Linotype machines used hot metal for typesetting.
2. George Orwell said Huxley was inspired by Zamyatin’s We. However, 1984 also seems to be inspired by We.
3. Learned to play golf. Not my cup of tea.
4. Korean hieroglyphs are composed using a pretty straightforward system.
5. There is an uninhabited ghost town of Nothing in Arizona.
6. SQLite developers are intent on supporting it through the year 2050 at least.
7. Stressed spelled backwards is desserts.
8. Fehler (mistake in German) spelled differently is Helfer (helper).
9. Did you know that in Dhivehi you say “go onto the beach” when you refer to sunbathing, and saying simply “go to the beach” means “to relieve oneself”?
10. Formosa was a short-lived republic that existed on the island of Taiwan in 1895.
11. Paul Alexander lived in an iron lung for 72 years.
12. Pons-Brooks comet is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 71 years.
13. Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated as UTC, which is not its abbreviation.
14. The verb mesmerize originates from the last name Mesmer.
15. Calima is a meteorological phenomenon that occurs when fine sand and dust particles from the Sahara Desert are lifted into the atmosphere and transported by prevailing winds.
16. CIA spent $20M on Project Acoustic Kitty. The cat was accidentally killed by a taxi right before its first assignment.
17. 3.5″ floppy disks were designed by Sony, that’s why they are much more pleasant to use compared to 5.25″ and 8″.
18. The middle part of a pretzel 🥨 symbolises hands folded in a prayer.
19. The aurora of August 28, 1859 was so strong telegraph operators in Boston and Portland were able to disconnect their power supplies and still transmit messages
20. 7410 is a pretty popular PIN code.
21. IBM Selectric typewriter used a ball instead of type bars.
22. The best things in life happen when you just ask.
23. Voyager is one light day away from Earth.
24. Three men on a boat has a sequel Three men on the Bummel.
25. Ciabatta was invented in 1982.
26. 0 and O, and many other symbols aren’t used in German passport numbers to avoid confusion.
27. There are 43 different CSS length units.
28. A butt of beer is equivalent to 108 gallons.
29. EU Parliament elections last from Thursday to Sunday to accommodate traditional voting dates in EU countries.
30. There are 8 versions of UUID.
31. One can run a LLM in a font file 🤯
32. And there is a font with built-in syntax highlighting.
33. Only in 19 US States a front license plate is not required.
34. Electric vehicles are exempted from highway toll in Czechia.
35. Scale, scale, and scale have three separate origins.
36. Israeli law sets out 42-hour workweek.
37. “Homo sapiens non urinat in ventum” translates to “A wise man doesn’t piss into the wind.” – Max Euweplein, built 1991
38. There are two different EU energy labels standards at the moment (pre- and post-2021), which make comparing lightbulbs confusing.
39. DuckDuckGo can search using another search engine with !bangs.
40. I’m AFOL.
41. Tog’s Paradox (also known as The Complexity Paradox or Tog’s Complexity Paradox) is an observation that products aiming to simplify a task for users tend to inspire new, more complex tasks.
42. There is a local time system in Ethiopia, in which there are two 12-hour parts starting at dusk and dawn.
43. The rotation of the TÜV-Sticker on German car number plates shows the month of the next inspection.
44. There are just six colors of these stickers that repeat every 6 years.
45. There is an underwater roundabout in a tunnel in Faroe islands.
46. π mph = e knots
47. German renewable electricity generation share is up to 80% on some days.
48. Drum brakes are used instead of disc brakes in electric vehicles because recuperation provides enough braking power.
49. Gabriel García Márquez himself refused to sell the screen rights to his novel One hundred years of solitude because he wanted it to be only a Spanish-spoken adaptation, and felt a film adaptation would not cover the entire plot due to its length.
50. Austrian villages of Eng and Jungholz are only accessible through German roads. The latter is an exclave.
51. The EURion constellation is a pattern of symbols incorporated into a number of banknotes worldwide since about 1996 to prevent counterfeiting.
52. A hatamoto (旗本, “Guardian of the banner”) was a high-ranking samurai in the direct service of the shogun.

This is post 26 of #100DaysToOffload

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