Flashing Palely in the Margins
A few things I learned these past two months
Below, a quick roundup of a few of the things I learned in June and July 2021.
In 2020, more than twice as many people were displaced within their own country by climate disaster as were forced out as refugees from conflict. (Guardian)
As of December 2020, Starbucks announced that iced drinks outsold hot drinks — even in winter. (BuzzfeedNews)
Before its liquidation, Kongō Gumi, a Japanese temple repair group, was the oldest continuously operating company in the world, running for over 1,400 years. (Works That Work)
In 2012, according to Statistics Canada, the number of teen pregnancies was surpassed by moms over 40 for the first time in Canadian history. (Globe and Mail)
The CPR dummy’s physiognomy is based on the death mask of a 19th-century Parisian teen who drowned in the Seine. (ScienceAlert)
Edgar Allen Poe’s bestselling book during his lifetime was a textbook about shells, titled “The Conchologist’s First Book: A System of Testaceous Malacology.” (Atlas Obscura)
For the past 15 years, price increases for brand-name prescription drugs have consistently outpaced inflation. (AARP)
The average Uber ride costs 40% more than it did a year ago. The average daily rate of an Airbnb increased 35%. (NYTimes)
During the Cold War, Soviet bootleggers took used x-ray films, many of them still containing images of bones and skulls, and recorded forbidden music on them, including jazz and rock & roll. (Vice)
The ideal workday lasts five hours, which is the maximum amount of time anyone can spend in deep focus in a single day. (WIRED)
E-card revenue nearly doubled during the pandemic. (NYTimes)
The average U.S. customer loses power for 214 minutes per year. That compares to 70 in the United Kingdom, 53 in France, 29 in the Netherlands, 6 in Japan, and 2 minutes per year in Singapore. The average customer in the United States loses power once every 9 months, excluding hurricanes and other strong storms. (T&DWorld)
Up to 95% of the world’s total fish population lives in a deep layer of the ocean that is hard to detect and we know little about. (Kottke)
In the last four years, Costa Rica has generated 98.53% of its electricity from renewable sources. (Under30Experiences)
Between 2000 and 2017, the number of people who died from opioid overdoses in Canada rose by 592 per cent. (CBC)
Japan’s oldest surviving cookbook is from 1643 and includes recipes for sashimi, sushi, udon and yakitori. (openculture)
Only 1.5 to 7% of the modern human genome is uniquely human. A large chunk of the human genome is shared with Neanderthals and other archaic species, and only a sliver of it makes us unique. (Vice)