[I always learn something from Tom Whitwell’s annual list. This year I learned that no matter how proficient I become technology, the nerds out there in googleland will keep coming up with new ways to confuse, control, and frustrate me. What have you learned recently? SB SM]
https://medium.com/@tomwhitwell/52-things-i-learned-in-2025-edeca7e3fdd8
by Tom Whitwell
This year I stopped being a consultant, started a tiny company, sold hundreds of little modular synths, hosted two incredible events, and I’m slowly getting used to calling myself an electronic musical instrument designer.
- Global deaths from air pollution are falling fast. Between 2013 and 2023 deaths per 100,000 fell 21%. Tens of millions of people are alive today who’d have died if pollution controls hadn’t worked. [Angus Hervey]
- An early version of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI, “did exceptionally well at reasoning, but had the crippling weakness that its outputs were an unintelligible mix of Chinese and English.” [Paul Taylor]
- You can (maybe) avoid paying tax on an unused office block by filling it with plastic tubs containing snails and lettuce. The office becomes, legally, a farm, so (maybe) exempt from tax under UK law. [Jim Waterson]
- You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]
- In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd] (I learned about this while prepping for the Dyski Radio Music retreat.)
- London is safer today, with fewer murders, than at any time since I moved here almost 30 years ago. [Fraser Nelson]
- A fusion energy start-up has developed a process to turn mercury into gold. Each year, their plant would produce 5 tonnes of gold and one gigawatt of electricity, both worth a similar amount. Unfortunately, the gold will be slightly radioactive, so must be left for 14–18 years before it’s safe to handle. [Tom Wilson]
- Job apps for nurses can set payment rates by analysing a nurse’s credit card debt to decide how desperate they are for work. [Katie J. Wells & Funda Ustek Spilda]
- Apple’s iPhone Air demo video was modified for the South Korean market because the ‘jibgeson’ 🤏 gesture is intensely controversial — men in gaming communities believe it means “Korean men have small genitals” and it’s sparked various consumer boycotts. [Kim Min-Young]
- The Casio F91W — the ubiquitous digital watch, worn by Osama Bin Laden, costing just £12 — has been faked for years, and the fakes are getting better and better. [Andy C]
- The Radioactive Shrimp Scare of 2025 was likely caused when a recycling plant in Cikande, Indonesia accidentally melted scrap metal from a piece of medical or industrial equipment containing Caesium-137. A plume of smoke was released across Java, entering the BMS Foods plant which processes 1/3rd of the shrimp imported into the US. [Paris Martineau]
- Woodwork is older than humans. [Christopher Schwarz]
- Most characters in the film Idiocracy wear Crocs because the film’s wardrobe director thought they were too horrible-looking to ever become popular. [Alex Kasprak]
- Nearly 0.7% of US exports, by value, are human blood or blood products. [dynomight]
- Relaxed mowing is when local councils cut grass less often to reduce costs and encourage biodiversity. [Richard Beecham]
- The Ceremonial Bugle is a small plastic device that slides into a real bugle and allows a non-musician to perform at a funeral. It has a discreet switch to select ‘Taps’, ‘Last Post’ or one of ten other calls. [Simon Britton via Nicolas Collins]
- Robot hands need fingernails. [Robot Man, via Matt Webb]
- First names affect how you are perceived at work. ‘Anna’ and ‘Joseph’ are consistently considered trustworthy, honest and reliable, while ‘Victoria’ and ‘Ryan’ are considered competitive, ambitious and extrovert. [Susanna Grundmann & Co]
- Retrospekt is a Milwaukee company with 40 employees that sells old technology; early 2000s digital cameras, iPods, corded phones. They recently bought 40 pallets of old VHS tapes. [Daisy Alioto & Francis Zierer]
- A gram of silica gel has almost the same surface area as two basketball courts. [Spencer Wright]
- A study of 500 diners found “attractive servers earn approximately $1,261 more per year in tips than unattractive servers.” Mostly because of “female customers tipping attractive females more than unattractive females.” [Matt Parrett]
- One of the first ever Velvet Underground gigs was entertaining the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. [Adam Ritchie]
- In the 2000s, at least 20% of the phones used in Sub-Saharan Africa physically passed through one building on Nathan Road in Hong Kong. [Peter Bil’ak]
- During 2024, the bubble tea and ice cream chain Mixue overtook McDonald’s as the world’s largest fast food chain with 47k branches. Founder Zhang Hongchao had multiple restaurant failures before he started selling ¥1 ice cream cones near a school. [Sam Tang]
- “Dependency length is the number of words during which the reader needs to ‘hold their breath’ before they reach a resolution.” [Conversion Rate Experts]
- Despite having the same name and the same triple diamond logo, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (cars, rockets, air conditioners) and Mitsubishi Pencil (pencils, pens, markers) are completely separate companies. The pencil company started ten years earlier, in 1887. [Carson Monetti]
- Researchers at MIT have developed a fibre computer that is stretchable and machine washable with 6 hours of battery life, weighing about as much as a sheet of A4 paper. [Nikhil Gupta & co]
- 51% of the animals in farms across the world are shrimp. [Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla]
- Every receipt for every purchase in Taiwan includes a lottery number worth up to £250k. It’s a tax compliance scheme with benefits. [Pablo Musumeci]
- Xiaotiancai is a smartwatch for tweens, with more than 50 million users in China. The watch has social features that have created a huge grey market where children pay for bots and outsourced professional account management to boost likes and followers. [Li Xin]
- In 2023, Nigeria had a million more births than the whole of Europe. [Our World in Data, via Charles Onyango-Obbo]
- Childhood peanut allergies are falling dramatically, perhaps because advice to avoid peanuts was reversed. [Simar Bajaj]
- The serial killer epidemic in 1970–80s US may have been caused by lead fumes from cars and factories, and solved by environmental regulations. [Caroline Fraser via James Lasdun]
- For the last 50 years, happiness in Europe was U-shaped over a lifetime. Higher for the young and old, lower in the middle. That’s changed over the last decade. In Northern Europe, the young are less happy, and wellbeing rises with age. In Southern Europe, the old are less happy, and wellbeing falls with age. [David G Blanchflower & Co]
- Namibia is the first country in the world where women hold the top three positions of power simultaneously (President, Vice President, Speaker). [Joy Funmilola Oke via Susan Emmett]
- The new domestic status symbol in LA is a massive front door. [Clio Chang]
- Why aren’t subtitles animated to graphically represent the mood of the speakers? Researchers in Southern Brazil have developed a system that does exactly that. [Calua de Lacerda Pataca & Co]
- Americans have been shrinking since the early 1980s. [John Komlos]
- In 1895, Tokyo bought electricity generators from the German company AEG, operating at 50Hz. A year later, Osaka bought generators from General Electric, operating at 60Hz. 130 years later the country is still split, with two separate electricity grids operating at two different frequencies. [Alice Gordenker]
- Writing is a way to escape your mind’s default setting. [Kupajo]
- The decoy effect in pricing (where adding a third, overpriced, option can encourage people to make a more expensive choice) has been validated by a study of 3.6 million wine purchases in a British supermarket. [Tom Stafford] (I wrote more about pricing and decoy effects a few years ago.)
- Chinese CO2 emissions fell by 1% in 2025, due to record solar power and falling coal use for energy generation. [Lauri Myllyvirta]
- Singer Momoka Tojo was forced by her management to post a selfie with the message ‘good night’ every day for a year as punishment after she shared a photo of her boyfriend. [Matthew Hernon]
- North Korean workers are constantly applying for IT jobs in big US companies with fake CVs and AI-enhanced interviews. One Fortune 50 company submitted their new-hire list to the FBI: “Six came back positive for North Korean agents, two of them were Indian citizens being paid by North Korea to take these jobs.” [Jessica Lyons]
- The Danish Government pays over $1mn each year to private metal detectorists for archaeological finds, according to a law passed in 1241. [Elizabeth Anne Brown]
- Global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000, due to measures like pesticide bans, more responsible media reporting of suicide, mental health education in schools and improved healthcare responses. [Dévora Kestel & co, via Angus Hervey again]
- When returned Hewlett-Packard printers are refurbished, a printer cable is added to the packaging. This solves the most common cause of returns — people who can’t get the Wi-Fi to connect. [David Owen]
- In September 2005, Steve Jobs announced (12:29) a feature called Smart Shuffle, which made iPod randomisation less random, in order to appear more random. Twenty years later, Spotify are still trying to find a shuffle algorithm that users like. [Heather McCalden]
- Marchetti’s Constant is the idea that throughout human history, from cave dwellers to ancient Greeks to 21st century Londoners, people tend to commute for about an hour a day — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes home. So faster travel leads to longer distances, not less time. [Cesare Marchetti, plus a 2025 update]
- Food spending drops 5% in households where at least one person is on Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs. Savoury snacks go down 10%, fast food spending down 8%. The only thing that seems to go up is yoghurt. [Sylvia Hristakeva & co]
- British Chaos refers to a cluster of TikTok personalities that “once might have just been a local character in a pub in Stevenage but have become international celebrities.” [Clive Martin]
- Gall’s law says: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” [John Gall p.52]
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