Tom Whitwell’s Things I Learned In 2019 List →

It’s become an annual tradition for me to read, and be surprised and delighted by, Tom Whitwell’s list of things he learned each year. A few titbits from this year’s:

4. Harbinger customer are customers who buy products that tend to fail. They group together, forming harbinger zip codes. If households in those zip codes buy a product, it is likely to fail. If they back a political candidate, they are likely to lose the election.

23. Sometime in the 1990s, it seems the US forgot how to make a critical component of some nuclear warheads.

42. A man who bought the personalised number plate NULL has received over $12,000 of parking fines, because the system records ‘NULL’ when no numberplate has been recorded.

And one relevant to the current election shenanigans in the UK (since I suspect it’s the same here):

47. “Polling by phone has become very expensive, as the number of Americans willing to respond to unexpected or unknown callers has dropped. In the mid-to-late-20th century response rates were as high as 70%… [falling to] a mere 6% of the people it tried to survey in 2018.”

You can read this year’s list here. And here are the ones for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.