52 Things I Learned in 2021 As of 2019, only 54% of Americans | TomBen’s Web Excursions

52 Things I Learned in 2021

As of 2019, only 54% of Americans accept the theory of evolution.

The number of people born in Antarctica (11) is fewer than the number of people who have walked on the Moon (12).

In the past 45 years, the top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90%.

People age at different speeds. “People varied widely in biological aging: The slowest ager gained only 0.4 ‘biological years’ for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.”

“It takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend.”

“What exactly is meant by the term ‘Holocaust’? It means that the global Jewish population in 2019 (~15 million) is still lower than it was in 1939 (16.6 million). So many Jews were murdered that we still haven’t recovered demographically after 80 years.”

How algorithms radicalize the users of social media platforms. “Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it.”

Scientists didn’t discover that the cause of the 1918 influenza pandemic was a virus until 1933. “At the time most microbiologists believed that influenza was caused by a bacteria.”

Galileo didn’t invent the telescope and wasn’t even the first to use it for astronomical purposes.

By counting excess deaths from Jan 2020 to Sept 2021, the Economist estimates that more than 15 million people have died of Covid-19 worldwide, more than 3 times the official death toll of ~4.6 million.

The Beishan Broadcasting Wall in Kinmen, Taiwan was a massive three-story speaker system built in 1967 to broadcast anti-Communist messages to China.

The ubiquitous Chinese food takeout container was originally invented for carrying oysters.