One of My Favorite End-of-Year Lists

Tom Whitwell has been sharing his “52 things I learned” lists for a few years now on Medium. They are truly a treasure trough of surprising, intriguing, shocking, and funny facts and figures I enjoy a lot.

Some highlights from this year’s list:

• “23. Sometime in the 1990s, it seems the US forgot how to make a critical component of some nuclear warheads. [Nick Baumann]”

Or:

• “44. Some blind people can understand speech that is almost three times faster than the fastest speech sighted people can understand. They can use speech synthesisers set at at 800 words per minute (conversational speech is 120–150 wpm). Research suggests that a section of the brain that normally responds to light is re-mapped in blind people to process sound. [Austin Hicks & R Douglas Fields]”

You can also find the previous years’ lists from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014 on Medium.