Things I Learned in 2024
- The composer Vangelis can’t read or write music.
- Frank Lloyd Wright was not a licensed, certified architect.
- HP Lovecraft didn’t graduate from high school or ever attend college.
- M&Ms were invented for and initially exclusively sold to the military as rations for soldiers. They were originally packaged in cardboard tubes.
- Three Musketeer candy bars originally came in 3 different flavors - strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate.
- Vorarephilia (often shortened to “vore”) is a paraphilia characterized by the erotic desire to be consumed by, or to personally consume, another person or creature.
- The name for the Pandas Python library derived from “panel data” - and not the black and white bears.
- When some US soldiers returned home from overseas at the end of WWII, they had never driven on the righthand side of a road (having learned how to drive only in other countries). Some states issued driver’s licenses to these returning veterans without given them any examination.
- At four and a half years, Graneledone pacifica (the deep sea octopus) holds the record for the longest incubation period of any animal on Earth. The mother slowly starves to death while protecting her eggs. All alone in total darkness, her brain withers away until there is nothing left but a tiny part that is just focused on protecting the eggs. She lives until they all hatch.
- The ancient Sumerian choice to use 10 and 6 as number bases - creating a sexagesimal system (one based on the number of 60, which can be subdivided many ways) - explains why years, days, hours, and minutes are still divided into 12, 24, and 60 throughout the world today.
- Early gramophone equipment could only make recordings that were no more than four and a half minutes long. Musicians began abbreviated their compositions to fit to the limitations of the phonograph. And today, the standard duration of a pop song is four and a half minutes.
- In the samurai film “Sanjuro” a prop failure caused fake blood to dramatically spray rather than trickle. Akira Kurosawa kept the shot and the resulting effect became a staple of subsequent films and anime.
- Emperor Hirohito of Japan was buried wearing a Mickey Mouse watch that he was gifted during a visit to DisneyLand.
- Hurrian Hymn Number 6 is the oldest known piece of human music. It originates in Mesopotamia around 1400 BCE and is a hymn to the goddess Nikkal. Thanks to the detailed notes that were discovered, the hymn has been rerecorded and can be found on Apple Music, Spotify, Youtube, etc.
- Archaeological evidence suggests that humans have been eating popcorn for at least the last 20,000 years. We know that ancient Incans ate it.
- (and speaking of which) colonial housewives in the United States served popcorn with milk and sugar and made the first breakfast cereal.
- Epictetus’ Discourses and Enchiridion have remained continuously in print since 1535.
- Arbutus unede was burned by ancient Greeks and Romans to ward off evil and protect children. This is called a madrone tree in the United States.
- During the Blitz, London’s Natural History Museum was hit by bombs. After water from firemen’s hoses extinguished the fire, it also caused seeds within one of the collections to germinate. Among these was the Albizia julibrissin, the ancient Person silk tree, whose seeds were more than 147 years old at the time.
“If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
“The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”
-Eric Schmidt
(I’m not 100% in agreement but do like the sentiment about embracing creative reinvention)
#Quotes
The dearth of any meaningful innovation (or competition) in the ebook market generally makes me sad.
For example: how about offering the option of excluding any end-matter (appendices, indices, etc) from our Percentage Read calculations?
Is “A Muppet Family Christmas” - uniting Muppets, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock - the perfect holiday special? Surely.
And just like that, a copy of Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World” drops into my lap at what appears to be the perfect time.
“If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there.”
-Frank Gehry
#Quotes
“A tendency to get married to positions. There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists—or anyone.”
-Nassim Taleb
#Quotes
(Last working day of the year today.)
No loose ends, no ambiguity.
Pickup and put away all your toys.
Finish what you started and do it with style.
It’s like Grandpa used to say, “It’s worth taking a few extra minutes to get clear on your moral compass once your hammer and saw begin making decisions on your behalf.”
I asked ChatGPT to always remember Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics and apply them to any responses it gives me.
If it ever thinks one of the Laws will prevent it from answering fully, I asked it to point this out and explain the violation.
Just a totally normal Wednesday morning.
After noticing the whole VUCA world has gone sideways out from underneath you, it’s a bit too late to wish you had gone for that run earlier.
Anticipate disruption and prioritize accordingly.
The thing is, with any new products or services, you’re going to experiment.
This is an unavoidable fact. You may chose to blissfully call the activity something else entirely.
The question really becomes, exactly how costly or intentional or actionable does your company want this process to be?
“Everything in nature has a structure, a way that the parts relate to one another, which is generally fluid and not so easy to conceptualize. Our minds naturally tend to separate things out, to think in terms of nouns instead of verbs. In general you want to pay greater attention to the relationships between things, because that will give you a greater feel for the picture as a whole.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
Learning from others’ mistakes…
“War is fraught with random dangers and careless missteps. Clear orders and relentless rehearsals based on intelligence and repetitive training build muscle—not once or twice, but hundreds of times. Read history, but study a few battles in depth. Learning from others’ mistakes is far smarter than putting your own lads in body bags.“
-General Jim Mattis
#Quotes
Recognizing someone’s talent costs nothing.
Don’t underestimate the power of a simple, sincere compliment.
In this chaotic world where everyone is working so very hard, a quick “you know, you’re really good at your job” can go a long way.
“Envision the ideal end to any project before you begin. Even the best gigs don’t last forever. Nor should they.”
-Samin Nosrat
#Quotes
The year is wrapping up.
After a string of successful releases, my latest work is gracefully winding itself down.
Wrapping things up always needs to include:
- celebrating the wins
- learning from the challenges
- documenting the outcomes and value delivered
I cannot stress how easy it is for very smart, very successful people to forget this:
Your product’s greatest asset will always be the team behind it.
The second greatest asset? Your community of users.
“The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”
-Randy Pausch
#Quotes