Thread by @alecstapp

Meta 🚨: Things I Learned Reading "Things I Learned in 2018" Posts

HT @kenthendricks @TomWhitwell @WillRinehart @david_perell, full links at end.

1/ "Less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus." @Laelaps smithsonianmag.com/science-nature…

2/ Marchetti’s constant: "The time humans spend commuting is about 1 hour and largely independent of the distance, the country or even the continent in which they live" journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

3/ "NBA teams behind by a point at halftime actually win more often than teams ahead by one, or approximately six percentage points more often than expected." faculty.chicagobooth.edu/devin.pope/ass…

4/ "There is approximately one business establishment for every 22 people in a city, regardless of the size of the city, each with an average of eight employees. These numbers hold constant regardless of how big or small the city is." @kenthendricks nytimes.com/2017/05/26/bus…

5/ "As of 2016, the brand most predictive of having a high income is the Apple iPhone. In 2004 it was Land O’Lakes butter, and in 1992 it was Grey Poupon Dijon mustard. " @kenthendricks nber.org/papers/w24771

6/ Fraternal Birth Order effect: "Each older brother increased the probability of being gay by about 33%... which results from a progressive immunization of the mother against a male-specific cell-adhesion protein." ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

7/ "In the short run, violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend." eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/m…

8/ The surface area of human lungs is about as big as one side of a tennis court: newscientist.com/article/mg1331…

9/ The entire state of Wyoming only has two escalators: theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

10/ "After including construction and land costs, [Shoup] measures the value of a Los Angeles parking space at over $31,000." @tylercowen nytimes.com/2010/08/15/bus…

11/ The Cagots are a minority group in France and Spain that has been persecuted for almost a thousand years and no one knows why: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot

12/ When women are ovulating they call their dads less and their moms more: researchgate.net/profile/Martie…

13/ "Mobility patterns evolve significantly yet smoothly, and the number of familiar locations an individual visits at any point is a conserved quantity with a typical size of ~25." nature.com/articles/s4156…

14/ "Less than 20 percent of the world's population has ever taken a single flight." cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boe…

15/ "Half of all the companies in any given cohort of U.S. publicly traded companies disappear within ten years, and a scant few make it to fifty, let alone a hundred years." books.google.com/books?id=bJPZD…

16/ “Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun." @Inkyfool bbc.com/culture/story/…

17/ A single drone delivery company is now delivering more than 20% of Rwanda's blood supply outside the capital: flyzipline.com/uploads/Ziplin…

18/ "US nuclear testing between the 1940s and 1970s may have killed as many Americans (from radioactive pollution) as were killed by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki." @TomWhitwell static1.squarespace.com/static/5926254…

19/ The average age in Niger is 15. In Japan, it's 47. cia.gov/library/public…

20/ "The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45." nber.org/papers/w24489

21/ "The 1,000 largest public companies in the U.S. took an average of 56.7 days to pay their bills last year ... The global market for trade finance is estimated at about $10 trillion." wsj.com/articles/how-i…

22/ "Through all of last year, Amazon retained $3bn in cash from unredeemed gift cards alone." @ajb_powell ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/11/152…

23/ "Hip-hop represents 38% of U.S. on-demand audio streams, Nielsen Music says, more than rock (20%) or pop (16%)." @NeilShahWSJ wsj.com/articles/behin…

24/ "The [South] has more than six million owners of at least 10 wooded acres." @RyanDezember wsj.com/articles/thous…

25/ "In 2016, Singapore's police reported 135 total days without any crimes including snatch-theft, house break-ins and robbery." @uptin cnbc.com/2018/01/16/sin…

26/ 70% of high school graduates attend college. 40% fail to graduate within six years. wsj.com/graphics/calcu…

27/ "Republicans thought 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual, while the actual number was about 6 percent. Democrats estimated that 44 percent of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. The actual share was 2 percent." @perrybaconjr fivethirtyeight.com/features/democ…

28/ "The United States has as many as two billion parking spots for about 250 million cars… The area of parking per car in the United States is larger than the area of housing per human.”  @mslaurabliss citylab.com/transportation…

29/ 80% of the world’s vanilla is grown in Madagascar. @alexandrawexler wsj.com/articles/your-…

30/ "The fall in the overall private sector labor share over the past 25 years was almost entirely driven by sharply declining shares in manufacturing (responsible for 89% of the drop), with some contribution from retail." @MichaelMandel progressivepolicy.org/blog/manufactu…

31/ "Of six crash reports involving robot cars filed in California so far this year, two involved a human approaching the car and attacking it." @russ1mitchell latimes.com/business/autos…

32/ "According to a seriously under-reported poll from Reuters from earlier this year, three out of four Facebook users are aware of their privacy settings, and even more know how to change their privacy settings (78 percent)." @WillRinehart fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/FACEB…

33/ "At least 46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets. Other fishing gear makes up a good chunk of the rest." @AdamMinter bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

34/ Streaming services now account for 75% of all music industry revenue: riaa.com/wp-content/upl…

35/ "The likelihood of selling the company increases by 4X after migration to Silicon Valley (from 1.4% to 7.1%), and migrants also have higher patenting, commercialization, venture capital financing, and sales." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

36/ The Midwest has the highest median return on invested capital at 517%. That beats the West which has a median return of 429%. @Jason_Rowley news.crunchbase.com/news/the-midwe…