Tidbits

Jensen Huang went to OSU

Signal doesn't even know how many users use the app.

Of the worlds 8 largest economies (USA, China, Japan, Germany, Uk, India, France, Italy) the USA has a better GDP to Debt ratio than 5 of them https://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html

Pathao lets you set your own prices to avoid complaints about rush hour scamming.

Thursday Nov 7, 2024

The reason the worlds second tallest mountain, K2, is named what it is, rather than some real name (Like Lhotse, Everest (aka Sagarmatar), Cho Oyu, Manaslu, etc) is that the locals didn’t know that it existed! It wasn’t visible from anywhere anyone would ever want to go. This is not true of any other mountains in the top 20.

Thursday, Oct 10, 2024

If you use an email marketing service like Mailchimp, they're able to give you information on which people opened your email. The way they do this is by embedding a unique, tiny image address in each email, which your email client then tries to load when it renders the email. Mailchimp detects which image addresses got GET requests, and uses that to track who opened which emails.

Tuesday, Oct 1, 2024

In Oregon, in order to offset lost gas tax revenue, it costs more than twice as much to register an electric vehicle with the DMV than a gas-powered vehicle. There's also a penalty for vehicles that get better gas mileage.

Saturday, Sep 28, 2024

The stability of consumer gasoline has deteriorated significantly since the 1980s, from ~9 months to ~2 months. This is largely due to the introduction of ethanol(modern gasoline contains ~10%), which absorbs water from the atmosphere over time, causing fuel to become less stable/efficient. Ethanol is introduced because it causes less greenhouse gas emissions, and it is able to be manufactured from agricultural products (corn, sugarcane, etc) rather than drilled for like oil.

Sunday, Jul 14, 2024

San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in your Hair), by Scott McKenzie, was the anthem of the summer of love, and actually drove a bunch of people to come to San Francisco (rather than the correlation going the other way as I'd assumed)

Saturday, Jul 13, 2024

Trumpets seem complicated to play. There are two ways to alter the pitch -- with your mouth, and with the valves. Your mouth gives most of the range, but because of how tubes work, you're only able to hit the harmonics, which decrease in spacing as they increase. So, for a "C" trumpet, you can (in order) play a low C, a middle C, a middle G, a high C, a high E, a high A flat, etc. If you want to hit the notes in between, you have to use the valves, which you control with your fingers. The effectively change the length of the trumpet tube by a fixed amount, which each correspond to a fixed decrease in pitch -- a half tone, a whole tone, or a minor third. By pressing them in combination, you can hit 8 ($2^{3}$) unique notes for each harmonic.

Thursday, Jul 11, 2024

If the moon lost all it's momentum (relative to the earth), it would take about two weeks until it crashed into us.

Monday, Jul 1, 2024

When estimating the net worth of individuals, Forbes values stock held in private companies at 90 cents on the dollar. So if you're a founder who owns 10% of a company that's worth 10 billion, you're "worth" 900 million.

Monday, Jun 10, 2024

OpenAI's model spec has nothing explicitly against racism, other than to encourage kindness and fairness while discouraging hate.

Friday, May 31, 2024

Guinness world records is the same Guinness as Guinness beer. In order to write the first ever book, they reached out to experts in various fields. Instead of asking them for direct pieces of information, they stated facts that felt right, and experts eagerly stepped in to correct them.

Thursday, May 30, 2024

The British Library has super tight security. You can't bring your bag into any book rooms, and have to transfer anything you want to bring with you into transparent plastic bags that the library provides.

Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Intel is the only player in the chip industry that both designs and manufactures their chips.

Monday, Mar 11, 2024

For any three variables $x,y,z$ that are all functions of eachother $$ \left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial y}\right)_z \left(\frac{\partial y}{\partial z}\right)_x \left(\frac{\partial z}{\partial x}\right)_y = -1 $$

Friday, Feb 29, 2024

The first primary use of Galileo’s discovery of the jovian moons was to redraw all of our maps! Since the Jovian eclipses happen very frequently, you can compare your local time to your global time (based off when the eclipse happened).

Sunday, Feb 11, 2024

Apparently MIT offers it's students an interest free 5000 dollar loan. If every freshman at MIT took it out and put it into treasury bonds, they could get a free 1000 dollars when they graduate.

Saturday, Feb 10, 2024

You can automatically switch the image type of an image on mac by going "right click->quick actions-convert image" in finder.

Monday, Feb 5, 2024

You can add /students to the url in canvas to see everyone that's registered for a class.

Monday, Jan 29, 2024

Aluminum is much harder to weld than steel, primarily because it conducts heat faster, and has a lower melting point. This gives you a smaller "window of workability".

Sunday, Jan 28, 2024

New Hampshire is the only US state to have no laws requiring adults to wear seatbelts. However, in many other states (such as Massachusetts), it’s a “secondary offense”, which means you can’t get pulled over for not wearing one, but if you get pulled over for a primary infraction, you can get cited for not wearing a seatbelt.

Thursday, Jan 25, 2024

The tallest oil platform is 2100 ft tall! It’s called the Petronius Compliant tower, and is in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of it is under water though.

Wednesday, Jan 24, 2024

If clench my face really hard (kindof like I’m pooping), and wiggle my jaw, it works much better to clear my ears when I’m diving.

Tuesday, Jan 23, 2024

There’s this restaurant called Bali in Curacao that’s not worth going to.

Monday, Jan 22, 2024

If you don’t check in to your international flight more than 45 minutes before it leaves, they won’t let you on. On the upside, they can usually reschedule you for free.

Sunday, Jan 21, 2024

The front seat of a Uhaul cabin can fit 5 people if you really try.

Saturday, Jan 20, 2024

The building manager of The Stud (student center at MIT) is named Tim Woods and he can be pretty reasonable once you get to know him.

Friday, Jan 19, 2024

If you have a vertical plank of wood holding back water (ie, in a rectangular tank), the center of torque is at 1/3 the height of the water.

Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024

In economics, there’s this thing called the “productivity J curve”, where basically, after a new technology is discovered, “productivity” (as measured via GDP) will stagnate, because free capitol is being invested into the new technology (ie, building railroad lines, integrating AI infrastructure, etc). But then, once these shorter-term investments pay off, GPD rises faster again, overcoming the rate of decreased productivity.

Tuesday, Jan 9, 2024

There are two styles of cross country skiing. There’s “Classic”, where you mostly keep your skis parallel to each other, and mainly use your arms. Then there’s ”Skating”, where you point your toes outwards and drive yourself forwards by pushing your legs outwards. Classic is more intuitive, but generally requires better packed/more consistent snow.

Monday, Jan 8, 2024

Apparently Oxford has a secret “night climbers” club where people climb the walls + towers + roofs around Oxford. It seems to have a bigger focus on athleticism.

Sunday, Jan 7, 2024

The Estonian flag looks like the average landscape in Estonia: White snow, black trees, blue sky. Look it up, you’ll see what I mean!

Saturday, Jan 6, 2024

The ideal strategy in Ticket to Ride is probably to hoard cards at the beginning of the game (higher locomotives/card average, and you preserve optionality as long as possible). Also, start with game with fairly few tickets, and make sure they all can be linked together. People usually undervalue the utility of just building lots of roads and going out of trains. Also, in the EU version, Palermo to Moscow is the best long-route since that part of the board is much less crowded.

Friday, Jan 5, 2024

Apparently most countries other than the US have interest free investment accounts with no restrictions on what they can be used for (Canada has TFSA, UK has ISA). The limits are higher or comparable to in the US. The US has Roth IRA, but that has super strict limits on how you can withdraw from it, usually is just for retirement savings.

Thursday, Jan, 4 2024

Estonia, Finland, and maybe a few other countries are all in the same free-market energy pricing scheme. Due to extremely cold temperatures as well as less supply (I assume Russia/Ukraine stuff), energy prices are now such that running a small space heater for one day would cost ~€150. God bless America, and her oil.