24 things I learned in 2024

I started the year wanting to assemble something like Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2024. I did come up with a pretty good list but it was limited by two factors: 1. My first reaction when finding something is not “ohhhh I learned something new” but rather “does this go in Sentiers?” So a lot of things learned went there. 2. I fell in and out of the habit of noting them, so by December 17th, when I formatted this, I was at 31 items.

Also note that a lot of them are links to Wikipedia, that’s another “limiting factor,” they tend to be things I heard or read elsewhere, otherwise I would have links to article and, again, they would have gone in the newsletter first!

I think it’s a fun list, presented in order of “discovery.” I sent it only to members, but the post is unlocked so feel free to share elsewhere if you enjoyed reading through.

1. Always funny to find the origin of words used in scifi. Ferengi must come from ferenghi. “In The Journeyer (2010, page 344), Gary Jennings speculates that this word is derived from Frank—Mongols heard westerners call themselves Franks during the Mongol invasion of Europe, and since then the Mongols called any white westerner a Ferenghi regardless of nationality. ‘Ferenghi’ has also been used in the same manner by Turks, Persians, Afghans, Indians and Arabs.”
2. Bonnie and Clyde with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty was “released in 1967, just 33 years after they died in a police ambush. Which feels weird in a way, given the film is now 57 years since the film came out.”
3. Margrethe Alexandrine Þórhildur Ingrid who was Queen of Denmark from January 14th 1972 to January 14th 2024, was also well known for her art. “Under the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer (the latter being an anagram for Margrethe and the former made up of her secondary names Ingrid, Alexandrine and Þórhildur), her illustrations were used for Danish editions of The Lord of the Rings, which she was encouraged to illustrate in the early 1970s. She sent them to J. R. R. Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity of her drawings to his own style.” Original source.
4. The Baghdad Battery. “Unearthed in 1936 near the ruins of Ctesiphon, this assembly of a ceramic pot, copper tube, and iron rod presents a puzzle that has baffled the scientific community for nearly a century. Was it an ancient tool for electrochemical energy storage, or does its significance lie elsewhere?” (It’s been debunked. Also, I noted “via Christopher Butler,” but not where exactly.)
5. “The body inch is embedded in Chinese medicine, but it’s not a universal. Everyone has a different body inch, it’s literally the measurement of the width of your thumb. A very skilled acupuncture practitioner can use your body inch, relative to you. When you learn acupuncture points, even though you see it on the diagram, it gives you a sense of where it approximately is but that point will be different for every person.“ (From a talk by Xiaowei Wang, quote edited.)
6. “Morgan’s canon: Don’t assume consciousness when a lower-level capacity would suffice.” Quoted from What feral children can teach us about AI. It’s actually a principle, not a canon, and “perhaps the most misrepresented statement in the history of comparative psychology is Lloyd Morgan’s canon.”
7. Haecceity. “The essence of a particular thing that gives it its unique particularity; those qualities that make an individual this specific individual and not some other.” First read in Rob Horning’s Infinite concretude.
8. Hickam’s dictum. “Hickam’s dictum is a counterargument to the use of Occam’s razor in the medical profession. While Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest explanation is the most likely, implying in medicine that diagnosticians should assume a single cause for multiple symptoms, one form of Hickam’s dictum states: ‘A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.’”
9. Anhedonia. “Anhedonia is the inability to experience joy or pleasure. You may feel numb or less interested in things that you once enjoyed. It’s a common symptom of many mental health conditions like depression.”
10. Where did the drop bear myth come from? “The drop bear myth, which says Australia is home to a killer species of koala that will jump from trees and latch onto you, has scared tourists for decades.”
11. To-day and To-morrow: The 100-year-old book series that predicted a wild and wonderful future. I think I ended up mentioning it in the newsletter, but I just love this story!
12. Jaboticaba. “Spelled jabuticaba in Portuguese, is a round, edible fruit produced by a jaboticaba tree (Plinia cauliflora), also known as Brazilian grapetree. The purplish-black, white-pulped fruit grows directly on the trunk ‘Trunk (botany)’) of the tree, making it an example of ‘cauliflory’.”
13. Why watermelons are a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. “In response to the ongoing war and the different debates around it, people are using watermelon images to communicate solidarity with the Palestinians — because the fruit’s colors match the Palestinian flag. But some activists are doing it as a workaround to tackle documented reports of online censorship and shadow banning, where platforms restrict creators' content without their knowledge.”
14. “The Whisky War, also known as the Liquor Wars, was a bloodless war and border dispute between the Kingdom of Denmark and Canada over Hans Island. […] In 1984, Canadian soldiers visited the island and planted a Canadian flag, also leaving a bottle of Canadian whisky. The Danish Minister of Greenland Affairs came to the island himself later the same year with the Danish flag, a bottle of Schnapps, and a letter stating ‘Welcome to the Danish Island’ (Velkommen til den danske ø). The two countries proceeded to take turns planting their flags on the island and exchanging alcoholic beverages.”
15. “The Sea Peoples were a group of tribes hypothesized to have attacked Egypt and other Eastern Mediterranean regions around 1200 BC during the Late Bronze Age. The hypothesis was first proposed by the 19th century Egyptologists Emmanuel de Rougé and Gaston Maspero, on the basis of primary sources such as the reliefs on the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. Subsequent research developed the hypothesis further, attempting to link these sources to other Late Bronze Age evidence of migration, piracy, and destruction.“ (Mentioned in the fantastic Exadelic.)
16. Watching the excellent Modernism, Inc documentary, I discovered the place of New Canaan in the history of modern architecture. Architect scenius ftw!
17. You might have known about Verlan, but did you know there’s also a Back slang too? Thought to have originated in Victorian England.
18. I’d never heard of William James Sidis. “His IQ was estimated to be 50 to 100 points higher than Albert Einstein's. He could read the New York Times before he was 2. At age 6, his language repertoire included English, Latin, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian. At age 11, he entered Harvard University as one of the youngest students in the school’s history. But as an adult, he purposefully faded into the shadows, avoiding the public scrutiny that followed him through his early years.”
19. Islands of Coherence. “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”
20. Constellation Software is a Canadian diversified software company based in Toronto. They have acquired over 500 businesses since being founded, and their 2023 revenue was US$8.4 billion. Never heard of them before this year.
21. The Council of Wise Men of the plain of Murcia and the Water Tribunal of the plain of Valencia. Part of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. “The irrigators’ tribunals of the Spanish Mediterranean coast are traditional law courts for water management that date back to the al-Andalus period (ninth to thirteenth centuries). The two main tribunals – the Council of Wise Men of the Plain of Murcia and the Water Tribunal of the Plain of Valencia – are recognized under Spanish law. Inspiring authority and respect, these two courts, whose members are elected democratically, settle disputes orally in a swift, transparent and impartial manner.”
22. The concept of the Purple Transition. A proposal for a reimagined commodity sector using: “small, modular, molten salt thorium reactors”; “iron powder, whose combustion is hot enough for cement production and iron smelting and yields... plain old rust”; “ammonium, which is much easier to store and transport than hydrogen, as fuel for internal combustion engines”; “different batteries for energy storage, made out of much more abundant minerals than lithium, like chloride sodium magnesium”. No idea as to its validity, just found it very intriguing and different to anything I’ve read.
23. The First Virtual Meeting Was in 1916. “The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting more than 5,000 attendees in eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast to coast.”
24. “Multiple titles were proposed for this new geologic era, but the term ‘Psychozoic Age’ caught hold: describing that era wherein living matter’s flows are dictated primarily by mental forces. As one of Dana’s colleagues put it, a time typified by ‘increasing dominance’ of the ‘cerebrum’ over all else.” (Noted in Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?)