This year I decided to follow Tom Whitwell’s lead and keep track of some things I learned throughout 2024. When this year’s list popped up in my reader, I realized I only had 20 items on mine because I kept forgetting about it. Oh well.

Here’s the list of some stuff I learned this year anyway

  1. Towns with “Mount” in their name might not refer to a mountain or physical attribute but to a town where travelers could find a new horse (or “mount”) if their horse was tired. (source)

  2. During the days of silent films, they would have a second camera set up near the first one to shoot a negative specifically for European audiences so they could send them a good quality copy. Apparently making a copy of the first negative was not good enough. (source)

  3. The brand name Sanka comes from a mash-up of the words “sans caffeine.” It was originally decaffeinated with Benzene, which turned out to be a carcinogen. (source)

  4. Pupil size can signify depression and listlessness. (source)

  5. The largest technically possible PDF file is 381km x 381km. (source) … or the universe? (source)

  6. Browsers can secretly render hidden text to uniquely identify and fingerprint your machine. (source)

  7. Our chronotype shifts at around age 20 and is the first marker of a shift from adolescence. (source)

  8. In the early days of talking movies, they would sometimes film a whole separate Spanish version with different actors (see Buster Keaton in both English and Spanish versions of Free and Easy/Estrellados). Similarly, sometimes silent versions were also filmed, like Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger. (source)

  9. The Hall of Justice from the Justice League cartoon was based on The Terminal, a building in Cincinnati. (source via source)

  10. “We blink about once every three to five seconds and usually don’t even realize it’s happening, despite losing an incredible amount of our daily visual input to blinking—up to 10 percent.” (source)

  11. In 1839, an enslaver was executed for murdering a woman he enslaved. (source)

  12. Dr. Joyce Brothers won big on a game show in a category on boxing. (source)

  13. In NYC, you can request that graffiti not be touched. (source)

  14. The academic field of “leisure studies” existed at the onset of the industrial revolution because there was a belief that all the efficiency would end up leading to copious amounts of leisure time. (source)

  15. There is a such thing as “immortal jellyfish.” I heard staff talking about them at a doctor’s office. (source)

  16. The Negro Leagues were every bit as competitive as their white counterparts: “After all, they played countless exhibition games against one another, and the record books show that the Negro Leagues or Black all-star teams won most of those games.” (source)

  17. Advice about what to do when caught in lightning has changed pretty significantly. (source)

  18. The word “jaywalker” was coined the day after James Baldwin was born. (source) and (source)

  19. The White House has several of its own ZIP codes. The first family’s personal mail has its own. Zip codes can also come and go for things like Burning Man or the Astrodome when it housed refugees after Hurricane Katrina. (source)

  20. Benjamin Franklin submitted articles under a pseudonym to a newspaper that his brother printed so he could get them published (Ben was denied several times under his own name). Ben’s alter ego was a minister’s widow named “Silence Dogood.” (source)