12/8/22, 2:34 PM 52 things I learned in 2022.

This year I worked on fascinating… | by Tom Whitwell | Magnetic Notes | Dec, 2022 |…

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A blue whale’s tail appearing from Lake Zug, Switzerland. Image generated by Dalle-2 in July 2022.

52 things I learned in 2022

This year I worked on fascinating projects in energy, media and health* at Magnetic,
and learned many learnings.

1. A bolt of lightning contains about ¼ of a kilowatt-hour of power. Even with recent

energy price rises, it’s only worth about 9 pence. [Sarah Jensen — although other

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sources suggest bigger lightning bolts could be worth more as much as £90]
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2. A ‘zhènlóuqì’ is an electrical floor shaker sold on Taobao, used to get revenge on

noisy neighbours. [Wang Xinyi]

3. In the UK and Australia, people tend to turn left when entering a building. In the
US, they turn right. It’s important to remember if you’re booking a trade show
booth. [Marc Abrahams]

4. Using ellipsis in writing signifes the writer is Gen-X or Boomer and can read as
confusing, passive-aggressive or even weirdly flirtatious to digital natives. [Kaye
Whitehead, from Gretchen McCulloch]

5. CountThings is an very successful app that counts things. It costs $120/month. The
templates page shows the things people pay to count. [CountThings]
656 5
6. Heavenbanning is a hypothetical way to moderate social networks. Instead of
being thrown off the platform, bad actors have all their followers replaced with
sycophantic AI models that constantly agree and praise them. Real humans never
interact with them. [Asara Near]

7. In 1739, there were three times more coffee shops per person in London than there
are today. [Ben Leggett and Andrew Seymour]

8. YouTuber Mr Beast employs a team of six people to make thumbnails for his
videos. Thumbnails are planned before the video is shot. [Amanda Perelli]

9. Fees from music playing on Peloton are “a top 10 account for pretty much all major
record labels right now.” [Jay Gilbert via Conor McNicholas]

10. In August, the world’s largest ‘hog hotel’ opened in Hubei, China. Up to 600,000 pigs
live in the 26-storey tower block, eventually producing 54,000 tons of pork per year.
The site has twice as much floor space as The Shard in London. [Ye Zhanhang]

11. Musicians make life hard for programmers. There are nine different bands called
Emperor, one band called Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum, and
a side project called ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ ‫ؖ؞‬ ৣৢ ৢ‫ ؞‬ꉺლ. [Julien Voisin]

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12. 37 per cent of the world’s population, 2.9 billion people, have never used the
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Internet. [International Telecommunication Union]

13. Older travellers use airport toilets to hear flight announcements, because acoustics
are much clearer. [Christopher DeWolf via Ben Terrett]

14. There’s a warehouse in Israel full of claw machines you can play remotely. They
send the prize if you win. [Tim Bradshaw]

15. Dog Buttons are a growth industry: dogs can learn to communicate by pushing
different coloured buttons to ask for things. [Soshi Parks]

16. Racing driver Ross Chastain qualified for a championship by using a move he
learned while playing a Nintendo racing game when he was 8 years old. [Alana
Hagues]

17. Data centres will consume 29% of Ireland’s electricity by 2028. [Pádraig Hoare via
Ed Curwen]

18. Teenage smoking seems to be a solved problem. [John Oyston via Dean Wilson]

19. No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off ‘standby’ devices. No, watching 30
minutes of Netflix isn’t the equivalent of driving 4 miles in a car. [Terence Eden and
George Kamiya]

20. If you want a question answered on the Internet, post a wrong answer first.
[keyoftypeof]

21. Someone is writing 16-digit numbers across walls all over Walthamstow [Reuben
Binns]

22. Applicants are 1.5% more likely to be granted asylum by a US judge the day after
their city’s NFL team won. [Daniel L. Chen]

23. The saga of broken McDonald’s Ice Cream machines is the perfect parable of a
plucky startup and a slow incumbent. [Andy Greenberg]

24. 40% of global shipping involves moving fossil and other fuels (oil, gas, wood
pellets) around. More renewables (solar, wind, nuclear, geo), means fewer ships.
[Bill McKibben]
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25. A man’s partner’s competitiveness increases their future income. Their own
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competitiveness makes little difference. [David Ong]

26. China is building 450 gigawatts of solar and wind power generation in the Gobi
desert. That’s six times the total power generation capacity of the UK. [Muyu Xu]

27. A deep learning model trained on 85,000 eyes can tell male from female eyeballs
with 87% accuracy but no one knows why. [Edward Korot & co]

28. In 2007, a nutritionist called Lori Baker accidentally discovered she was the
greatest Tetris player in the world [Billy Baker]

29. Japanese atom bomb survivors lived five years longer and were less likely to get
cancer than average Japanese citizens. [Shizuyo Sutou]

30. In the 1920s, new car sales were falling, so the industry promoted the term
‘jaywalking’ to blame accidents on pedestrians, rather than aggressive drivers.
[Peter Norton via Clive Thompson]

31. Morse Code keys are a high-end luxury item for ham radio enthusiasts, with gold
plating and carbon fibre parts, costing €500+. [Pietro Begali]

32. Before the industrial revolution, silver didn’t need to be polished, because there
was less sulfur in the atmosphere (unless you lived near a volcano). [Michael
Briggs]

33. For eight years, some Xerox photocopiers had a bug that could silently change
numbers in copies. [Matt Webb]

34. In 1985, Alan Sugar’s Amstrad launched a computer with a non-functioning 8kb
memory chip attached to the motherboard in order to get round Spanish taxes.
[deepfb]

35. Consumer goods branding existed in the ancient city of Uruk, Mesopotamia over
5,000 years ago. ‘Temple-factories’ mass-produced, packaged and labelled goods
like bread, beer, wine and woollen clothes. [David Wengrow]

36. Percussionist Emil Richards played the finger clicks in The Addams Family theme,
the bongos in Mission Impossible and the xylophone in the theme for The

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Simpsons. [Russell Davies]

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37. Egg yolk colour preferences are regional: Northern Europeans like paler yolks,
Mediterraneans a deeper orange. In South Africa, white corn makes egg yolks
super pale. Farmers use the DSM Yolk Fan to pick the perfect colour (and feed
additive). [Ari LeVaux]

38. The Chinese government has launched a crackdown on ‘weird’ and ‘ugly’ fonts.
[Wu Peiyue]

39. Researchers asked 100 people whether a reasonable person would unlock their
phone and give it to an experimenter to search through. Most said no. Then the
researchers asked 103 other people to unlock their phone and give it to them. 100
of them complied. [Rob Henderson]

40. The best paid lifeguard in LA received just over $500,000 in 2021. In Australia,
Bondi Beach lifeguards are paid less than A$70k. [Adam Andrzejewski & Andrew
Taylor]

41. It was once fashionable in Paris to send one’s linens to be bleached in the sun of
Saint-Domingue (Haiti). In 1782, after a fleet of 100 ships arrived from the
colonies… “Paris was full of men and women who wore the handsome linen
bleached in Saint-Domingue. This linen drew everyone’s eyes.” [Sofi Thanhauser]

42. Marc Jacobs and a midwestern university have settled their legal battle after both
trying to trademark the word ‘THE’, the most common word in English. [Mark
Williams]

43. A Chinese woman created over 200 fictional articles about Russian history on
Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words of completely imagined history. It
took ten years for anyone to notice. [Wu Peiyue]

44. In March 1967, the CIA tested Acoustic Kitty, a live cat with a microphone, battery
and antenna surgically implanted. Sadly, on its first public trial, the unfortunate
animal was run over by a taxi. [Nate Jones]

45. We should all learn to use conversational doorknobs. [Adam Mastroianni]

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46. The creators of Sim City had a problem with car parking: “We realised there were
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way too many parking lots in the real world. Our game was going to be really
boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.” [Geoff Manaugh and Nicola
Twilley]

47. The International OCD Foundation has a helpful 9-step photographic rating of
household clutter as a way to diagnose hoarding disorder. Level 3 is “standard
household clutter”, while level 7 “poses significant safeguarding issues.” [Hoarding
Center via Jon Day]

48. 70% of Gen Z viewers tend to watch videos with subtitles, which is why a team at
Netflix worked extra hard on the subtitles for Stranger Things. [Matt Zajechowski]
(This year at Magnetic I spent a long time listening to Gen Z talk about the future of
TV for Channel 4)

49. Wasps are hand-reared by villagers in Kushihara, Japan, where wasp tempura and
(delicious looking) grilled sticky rice coated in a sauce made of miso, peanuts and wasp
larvae are local specialities. [Soleil Ho]

50. The push button was a controversial new interface when it became popular in the
1880s. [Rachel Plotnick via Matthew Wills]

51. Fondue was popularised by the Swiss cheese cartel. [Robert Smith]

52. During a French Navy exercise, a frigate was (virtually) destroyed despite radio
silence. The (virtual) enemy was able to roughly locate the ship via an (real) active
Snapchat account from one of the sailors. [Arthur Laudrain]

Previous 52 things lists: 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021

Tom Whitwell is Managing Consultant at Magnetic (formally Fluxx ), a company that helps
clients solve big problems and build better products. We work with The Economist, Mars,
WSP, Innovate UK, Bupa, Condé Nast, National Grid, Channel 4, National Highways and
others.

*Do get in touch if you want to know more: tom.whitwell@wearemagnetic.com

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