Trung Phan Profile picture
Jan 1 15 tweets 6 min read
Read a great Reddit thread putting historical dates in perspective.

Here are 8 gems.

1/ The moon landing was only 66 years after the Wright Brothers first flight (1903-1969). Within a lifetime, humans went from having limited flight tech to travelling ~239k miles from Earth.
2/ On a related note, Cleopatra (b. 69 BC) lived closer in time to the moon landing (1969) than the construction of the pyramids (~2500 BC).

In fact, some wooly mammoths still roamed the earth when the pyramids were being built.
3/ A really well-travelled person could have potentially met Socrates (470-399 BCE) Confucius (551-479 BCE) and Buddha (563-483 BCE).
4/ Oxford University (1096) is older than Machu Picchu (1450), and it's not even close.
5/ Harvard University was founded in 1636, decades before Isaac Newton developed calculus (mid-1660s).
6/ J.R.R Tolkien (The Lord of The Rings), Otto Frank (The father of Anne Frank), and Adolf Hitler where all present as foot soldiers at the battle of the Somme (1916).
7/ People began actively traveling the Oregon trail (1843–1869) when the fax machine was invented (1843).
8/ While Hannibal was crossing the Alps into the Roman Empire with elephants, the Great Wall of China was in its initial construction phases.
Anyways, Happy New Years.

If you want to read a newsletter that existed at the same as the iPhone and Avatar 2, check out my Saturday email on business and tech. getrevue.co/profile/trungt…
On a related note, the best “historical figures crossing paths with each other” is def from @waitbutwhy: waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizo…

Also check out the full Reddit thread: reddit.com/r/history/comm…
PS. If you’re like me and consume a ton of content, check out the AI-powered research app I’m building that supercharges your:

• Reading (instant summaries)
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Three other good “historical dates in perspective” nuggets: reddit.com/r/history/comm…
To further put the 1969 moon landing into perspective, look at Apollo 11’s Apollo guidance computer (ACG).

Compared to ACG:

▫️a TI-73 calculator has 140x the processing power
▫️an iPhone 11 has 100,000x the processing power and 7,000,000x the memory

🔗 realclearscience.com/articles/2019/…
A lot of replies note that Gore Vidal’s 1981 book “Creation” is about someone who “travels the known world (6th-5th BCE) comparing the political and religious beliefs of various empires”.

The protagonist meets Buddha, Confucius and Socrates.

🔗 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_…

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More from @TrungTPhan

Dec 29, 2022
Shoutout to Jerry’s Pizza from Romania for the $100B in earned media its received from Andrew Tate
Translation of a online Romanian paper (Gandul): Romanian authorities wanted Tate and his brother to be in the country and confirmed it via social media.

Not actually clear if the pizza box video was the one, but Tate posted it last night.

🔗 gandul.ro/actualitate/ex…
Absolutely wild
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Dec 29, 2022
Movie theatres after selling someone 1 large popcorn, 2 Diet Cokes and a Snickers bar for $138. Image
The one movie I wish I could have seen in theatres is The Godfather (and also Groundhog Day). trungphan.substack.com/p/the-godfathe…
Absolute masterclass from Jeremy Irons
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Dec 28, 2022
Up to the 1990s, raw salmon sushi was not eaten in Japan.

What changed? Norway went on a 10-year marketing campaign to sell Atlantic salmon in the East Asian country. And the plan worked.

Here’s a story 🧵 Image
Traditionally, Japan didn’t eat raw Pacific salmon b/c the fish had parasites.

Meanwhile, in the 1970s, Norway got really good at farming parasite-free Atlantic salmon

However, government subsidies led to over-farming and Norway needed to find a way to get rid of excess salmon. Image
Japan was a natural market for raw fish but Norway had to overcome a few obstacles:

▫️The stigma of raw salmon
▫️Atlantic salmon has a different color
▫️Atlantic salmon is fattier (which ended up being a good thing) Image
Read 15 tweets
Dec 28, 2022
A Reddit post explains the Southwest Airlines meltdown (it cancelled >2.5k flights today).

TLDR: Crew scheduling system is 20 years outdated. In event of disruption, can only be changed via phone and manually updated (no app/internet options). And generally understaffed.
Link to Reddit: reddit.com/r/flying/comme…

Separately, the last time Southwest had this many cancellations, it cost the airline $75-$100m (think for the rebooking, passenger food/stay etc).

🔗 amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/12/27…
Southwest’s current CEO Bob Jordan took the job in February 2022. He’s been with the airline since 1988 (and held 15 roles).

Calls to upgrade the system predate him and go back to previous CEO Gary Kelly, Jordan’s mentor.

🔗 dmagazine.com/publications/d…
Read 5 tweets
Dec 27, 2022
The best part in movies is when the actor casually walks away from something they just blew up
For more film references describing the intricacies of the financial system, check out my newsletter: trungphan.substack.com

(Side note: the inspiration for this meme is probably my fave fast food meme ever).
Here are 2 minutes of people casually walking away from explosions in movies.

🔗
Read 6 tweets
Dec 26, 2022
Apple: “You’re out of memory.”

Me: “Nah, impossible. I got 4 terabytes of cloud storage.”

My kid: Image
No age group can resist the psychological appeal of Apple products!!! trungphan.substack.com/p/the-psycholo…
The funniest part is they only need a 2-second window to use up like 10Gb of storage
Read 4 tweets

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