101 Things We Learned in 2023

Every Friday, we update our teammates on something we learned that week. And while we did plenty of learning about tech, hiring, development, and everything in between, we also have a host of fun facts to share with you. So without further ado, here are 101 things the Gun.io team learned this year.

1. Learned about the micronation Sealand.
2. The Jevons Paradox, which is counterintuitive and dramatically affects energy use and environmental policy.
3. There is a difference between absolute and relative atmospheric pressure. One adjusts for a location’s elevation relative to sea level, and the other does not.
4. The Memphis Zoo has an elderly Komodo dragon called Jeff, who is blind and deaf and once bit Phil Bronstein (journalist most famous for being married to Sharon Stone) in the foot.
5. During the 70s oil crisis FedEx nearly went bankrupt. The founder gambled their last $5k in Vegas into $27k to keep them afloat for a few more weeks until they could get an investment.
6. The Bear is based on the Italian Beef shop that was closest to where I did my software bootcamp program in Chicago, and a place I ate weekly.
7. When you die in the US, and you’ve donated your organs, they declare you dead twice, and the transplant teams have to be outside the room.
8. Commotio Cordis is when you receive trauma in the chest right at the perfect time when your heart is about to beat again. It can mess up the electric signal of your heartbeat, throw your heart off rhythm, and is very deadly.
9. Russian czars monopolized vodka production and used it as a tool to control society (the drunk population won’t revolt). The communists were prohibitionists, Stalin brought production back, Gorbachev reinstated prohibition, and then commercial production returned after.
10. The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn!? The Tennessee state animal is a raccoon.
11. You can get married at a Taco Bell in Las Vegas, and the package includes a bouquet of hot sauces.
12. The largest pollination event in the world is Central Coast California almonds. About 2 million hives are required to pollinate 1.6 million acres of almonds.
13. Proprioception is the dizzy-ish feeling you get after getting off a treadmill because while on it, your body feels like it’s still moving through the space around it, even though you’re effectively staying put.
14. The Lawmakers in Achaemenid Persia would debate all issues twice. Once sober and once drunk. A proposal had to make sense in both cases in order for it to be considered a good idea.
15. The boiling point for water at the top of Mt. Everest is 162°F, about 50 degrees below the boiling point at sea level.
16. Diddy used to be a backup dancer for Big Daddy Kane and Heavy D.
17. The history of ancient Egypt is so long, that during the last dynasty, there were archeologists studying the early dynasties.
18. Learned about the Ames window by Adelbert Ames, which is mind-bending.

19. Learned about the evolution of Big Boy into Shoney’s, and apparently, Frisch’s is a whole other thing.
20. I visited a llama farm this past weekend and learned that llamas can spit up to 10 feet when they’re angry.
21. Sloths can hold their breath for over 40 minutes, which is longer than a dolphin.
22. 4% of cheese in the world gets stolen. It’s the most stolen food worldwide.
23. The 1979 one-hit wonder “My Sharona,” to this day, still makes the writer an easy $100k to $300k a year! Meanwhile, the real-life Sharona gets none of that money but seems to be doing ok selling real estate.
24. I learned how to measure the weight of ice on trees in corgis.

25. F1 throttle/brake setups are completely bespoke to each driver on how they want it set up, angle, width, etc. Each pedal has grip tape and flags to keep the drivers’ feet from shifting off the pedals. The brake pedal is made out of carbon fiber vs the throttle being aluminum. Interesting to see how keen engineers are to detail on even the smallest items.
26. Learned about Tahoma-31 this week and how it’s the locally grown grass that’s to be used in the upcoming Super Bowl. It’s a type of Bermuda that is new to the market but is apparently very durable to US cold/warm climates, which makes it great for ‘transition’ zones. It’s early to green in the spring and late to brown in the fall/winter. Right now it is still relatively cheap, but it is expected to increase significantly next year as demand for it has skyrocketed.
27. Amtrak still operates the Auto Train daily from Lorton, Virginia, to Sanford, Florida. Passengers can load their vehicle on the train for the 855-mile, 17-hour trip and rent a sleeper cabin instead of making the drive.
28. Cows produce 3% more milk when they listen to music, particularly slow jams.
29. Medical device companies attend trade shows, just like the rest of us, which means they are doing product demos, just like the rest of us, but for them, it means they are frequently hauling cadavers into hotel ballrooms in order to do so.
30. During the filming of Groundhog Day, Bill Murray was bitten multiple times and had to get a series of rabies shots.
31. During winter, mice like to get into beehives, and sometimes they die. Honeybees are very clean creatures and have specific pallbearer workers tasked with removing dead bees, mites, etc… from the colony. However, they can’t remove the mice due to their size. Instead, they remove all of their fur and coat them with propolis, which is the same resin-like substance that they use to reinforce their hive, made from tree resin, saliva, and beeswax. They essentially mummify to eliminate the threat of contamination.
32. This week I learned about the life and wild few years of John McAfee.
33. Ski resorts in Japan use Green-Red-Black to denote difficulty rather than the more US/European Green-Blue-Black.
34. Learned this week about a Roman Emperor named Maximinus Thrax, who, by all means, climbed the rankings of the Roman Empire simply by being a gigantic person. Cited in texts as “8 Feet & 1 Finger” tall, it is widely believed that his height was somewhere around 7’6+.
35. Pythagorean Triples are right triangles where the lengths of all three sides are whole numbers, like 3, 4, 5. Making them really easy to remember.
36. 12 new moons of Jupiter were discovered, and the diffuse luminosity of Jupiter makes it hard to observe those moons. Jupiter has 92 moons that we know about now.
37. Before there were established trails across the country, the early gold rushers from the east coast opted to instead SAIL AROUND SOUTH AMERICA, like maniacs, to reach San Francisco.
38. I learned about space-time geometry and what a flat torus is.
39. Negative prompts for stable diffusion are nearly as powerful as the regular prompts.
40. “Hawaiian pizza” (ham and pineapple, which I’m not a particular fan of) was created in Canada by a Greek gentleman named Sam Panopoulos.
41. Nikola Motors’ zero-emission 18-wheelers were fake, and the founder was convicted of fraud in Oct. For their announcement video, they let it roll downhill since it doesn’t have a real motor.
42. This week my kids learned that cats are said to have 9 lives in the US when watching the Puss in Boots movie, and they were confused because here in Brazil, we say cats have 7 lives.
43. Tigers are orange because most of their prey have the Protanomaly flavor of color blindness, which makes reds and oranges appear green, so they’re actually perfectly camouflaged for their environment and food sources.
44. A geneticist in the 1990s found out what made Brussels sprouts gross and bred it out of them, paving the way for Brussels sprouts’ recent time in the culinary spotlight.
45. The founder of Duolingo also created captcha.
46. Constructing the Cologne cathedral began in 1248, and paused due to resources until 1842. It was completed in 1880 as the world’s tallest building.

47. In 2009, some workers digging in a peat bog in Ireland found a 3,000-year-old barrel of butter that was still (technically) edible.
48. The moon, yes, the moon, will likely be getting its own time zones in preparation for an increase in human activity.
49. A pitching clock was introduced in minor league baseball and reduced the game time by an average of 23 minutes.
50. Learned more about Ed Temple, former women’s track coach at Tennessee State University. He was responsible for over 30 national championships and for sending 40+ athletes to the Olympics, which is wild. The US Olympic committee went so far as to say that he is the most prolific women’s track and field coach in the history of the sport.
51. Learned about the Gullah culture and that the first imports of rice in the “New World” were from West African slaves. It was called Carolina Gold Rice, and is still grown in the low country.
52. The Borgund Stave church in Norway dates back to around 1180 AD, so it’s close to being 900 years old. It’s completely built of vertical wood boards or “staves,” which is insane to think that this is still standing today.
53. Last week, Ruth E Carter won the Oscar for costume design in Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I learned that Mayans used rubber in the 16th century, which allowed her to incorporate it into the underwater costuming.
54. There are over 2 million invasive Brown Tree Snakes in Guam.
55. The Maritime Origins of the Gin and Tonic.
56. One of the hardest things for trauma surgeons to do is be cognizant of the fact that they could be working on someone they know–it violates their training and interrupts the flow state they need to be in to work quickly.
57. The computing power of microchips doubles every year, known as Moore’s Law, based on the number of transistors in the chip.
58. I learned about David Popa’s art this week. He uses only charcoal and soil to create huge pieces of temporary art on floating ice groupings in Finland. Amazing.

59. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian explorer and chronicler, documented his observations while accompanying Ferdinand Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe from 1519 to 1522. Pigafetta noted the loss of a day due to crossing the International Date Line, an early record of the phenomenon later understood as the result of traveling across different time zones.
60. Thanks to TikTok, I learned how to uninstall, clean, and reinstall the plumbing under my kitchen sink.
61. Learned that 42.4% of Japanese households watched the WBC final, despite it being at 8a for them.
62. The Susquehanna River is one of the older rivers in the world. It’s widely accepted that it actually predates the Appalachian mountains based on the unique way it runs through them (basically, it cut through them as they were forming).
63. There are over 80 different kinds of bioluminescent mushrooms.
64. A company in Australia made a woolly mammoth meatball by splicing lamb and mammoth DNA.
65. One of the biggest contributors to our population’s growing allergy problem over the last 50 years is due to our unsustainable ratio of male-to-female trees. tl;dr urban sprawl needs landscaping, and landscapers select male trees because they flower and don’t have fruits that fall and create messes. But without female trees, the pollen produced by male trees has nowhere to go, so we’re coated with it constantly which makes us all need Benadryl.
66. Given the size and location of their taste buds, catfish are basically just giant tongues.
67. The Geico gecko came about because of a strike by the screen actors guild.
68. Some of the world’s most expensive coffee is made from poop.
69. Former Utah Jazz legend Karl “The Mailman” Malone’s favorite type of cheese is Muenster.
70. Dogs have slits in the sides of their nose so that they can sniff faster (air is exhaled through the slit so it doesn’t corrupt fresh scents), and, contrary to popular belief, there are many scents where our sense of smell is more refined than theirs (for example, the chemical compound that makes bananas smell like bananas).
71. Based on an analysis in 2019, Aesop Rock is considered to have the largest vocabulary in hip hop.
72. The phrase that’s synonymous with Nike, “Just Do It,” was based on the last words of a spree killer from Utah named Gary Gilmore, right before he was executed by a firing squad.
73. Electric eels are not actual eels and are more like catfish. The invention of batteries was modeled after their muscle cells.
74. Watched Jerry and Marge Go Large this week and learned about a man who figured out the statistical minimum spend to beat a lottery system.
75. There are some fire-chasing beetles who only mate in wildfires, and they have special nerves under their wings that help them locate fires up to 80 miles away.
76. I learned about Conway’s law, which says an organization’s internal systems will mirror their communication structure.

77. Naked mole rats can survive for 18 minutes without oxygen, which is a good thing since they sleep in groups and frequently roll over and on top of each other.
78. The Missouri Cheese Caves have 1.4 billion lbs of subsidized dairy product stored underground
79. I learned why so many old college logos look the same or similar. It’s because they were all drawn by a guy named Arthur Evans. He was the head artist for Angelus Pacific Co, which specialized in selling merchandise and branding services to colleges. Also, back then, licensing wasn’t really a thing, so if a school needed a tiger, they just re-used their old tiger image from another school. That’s also why they all wore sailor hats.
80. Golden Girls was picked up for a full 13-episode run before anyone had even written a script.
81. Peregrine Falcons can hit top speeds of 250mph, Harris’s Hawks are social birds, and a Barn Owl, despite weighing only 1.2 lbs, can kill and eat 10,000 mice in a year.
82. During the Third Mithridatic War, a meteor fell from the sky and they called off the battle. Both sides being superstitious, the meteor was seen as a sign from the heavens.
83. In North Carolina, there is a 5-hour limit on Bingo games here, and you have to have a 48-hour cooling-off period between those 5-hour games. There is also a max cash prize of $10 if you’re not using Bingo as a fundraiser, but a max of $500 if it IS a fundraiser.
84. At the time irrational numbers were discovered, their discovery was so upsetting to one group that it may have led to the destruction of their religion and possibly the murder of the man who made the discovery.
85. There are three “ancestral” types of citrus that all other types are derived from: mandarin, citron, and pomelo.
86. Bermuda is not where I thought Bermuda was. Always assumed it was further south, but the closest land point is Cape Hatteras, NC. Had no idea.
87. The US has 4x more tornados/hurricanes/cyclones (whatever the right name is) than all other countries combined!
88. A single oyster filters 50 gallons of water a day.
89. Michael Jackson’s quirky “shamon” phrase he does every now and then was actually an homage to Mavis Staples, an under-appreciated but highly influential soul artist from the 70’s.
90. I learned all about electrolocation and that the 40,000 thunderstorms that are occurring at any given moment do little to interfere with an animal’s ability to use electrolocation to navigate.
91. Absolut Vodka has a solid marketing history as a gay brand. They were the first to view the LGBTQA+ community as a trendsetter and directly target us for brand awareness. Throughout the 80s, they collaborated with openly queer artists (Andy Warhol, Keith Haring), bought ad space in gay men’s magazines, and even and to this day still actively fundraised millions of dollars for AIDs charities.
92. June 26 is a big day historically for Gay rights in the US. 20 years ago, on June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the Texas law that led to the arrest of John Lawrence and Tyron Gardner was unconstitutional in the landmark case Lawrence v Texas. Similar laws in 13 states were all overturned with the decision that hinged on a person’s right to privacy. Exactly 12 years later, on June 26, 2015, SCOTUS ruled in Obergefell v Hodges that the right to marry is a fundamental individual liberty & denying that right to gay couples violates the 14th Amendment.
93. Antarctica has no official time zone, and the people living and working there generally adhere to either their home country’s time zone or whatever the closest land mass is to their particular location on the continent.
94. A new epoch (the Anthropocene) is now accepted to have begun in the 1950s. It’s the first epoch understood to be caused by the impact of human technology.
95. I learned about the 3 major strands of Christianity and their historical roots, the Dutch philosopher and catholic reformist Erasmus, and possible approaches to reconcile the strands by adopting multiple models instead of picking one or another, something similar to what scientists do to model the light behavior, both a particle and a wave, not a particle or a wave.
96. Armadillos can be carriers of leprosy!
97. Romans consumed half a liter of undiluted wine per capita daily.
98. Worcestershire is easier to make than spell, but it involves a crazy list of ingredients, and the first step is boiling raisins.
99. A data company named MaxMind decided to update what everyone knew as the geographical center of the U.S. from  39°50′N 98°35′W to 38°N 97°W, thus setting the default IP location for 6 MILLION users to a small farm in Kansas. This led those poor farmers to get harassed by law enforcement and other randos at all hours of the night and day for years.
100. Bugs Bunny’s carrot munching and “What’s Up Doc?” thing was a parody of Clark Gable in a super popular movie at the time called It Happened One Night.
101. There’s a portal to the underworld under a church in Oaxaca, so I guess it’s been nice knowing all of you.