This year we continued to write; we published a list of the best blogs. Here are 26 things we learned in 2025 — half the usual number:

1. In 2024, the average company was 14 years old at IPO, in 2004, it was 8. (Blackrock).
2. “Alfred Loomis bought a mansion called Tower House in 1926, located in Tuxedo Park, a small village outside of New York City. He renovated the entire mansion and converted much of it into a lavishly funded physics and biology laboratory … Einstein would later call it a “palace of science”. (Palladium)
3. The share of poetry lines that rhyme has been in long-term decline. (Economist)
4. “Until around 2009, pedestrian deaths in the US had been falling, declining from 7,516 deaths in 1975 to just 4,109 in 2009 (in per capita terms, this decline would be even larger). But since 2009, pedestrian deaths have surged.” (Construction Physics)
5. “Consumers of all age groups are using around four different fragrances regularly, which is a significant change from a decade ago when they had one signature scent.“ (The Transcript)
6. The best private equity/venture funds don’t return capital for 16-20 years (SVB).
7. “The average U.S. car commuter is spending a record 63 hours annually stuck in traffic. That’s the most since 1982, when the dataset begins.” (Texas A&M)
8. “Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit”. (Book and Sword)
9. In June 2025, China overtook the US in large language model (LLM) downloads. (State of AI report)
10. The Three Gorges Dam moved so much material closer to the equator that it added 0.06 microseconds to the length of each day. (UnHerd)
11. Zymurgy’s Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics: “Once you open up a can of worms, the only way to get it back in is to use a bigger can.” (Secretorum)
12. “Both [Jensen] Huang’s aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth, mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. Jensen’s parents sold nearly all their possessions in order to afford the academy’s tuition.” (Wikipedia)
13. Stablecoins could soon be the biggest buyers of treasury bills (T-bills) in the world. (BIS)
14. “The computational performance of leading AI supercomputers has doubled every 9 months.” (Pilz et al)
15. “The speed of intercontinental travel rose from about 35 kilometers per hour for large ocean liners in 1900 to 885 km/h for the Boeing 707 in 1958, an average rise of 5.6 percent a year. But that speed has remained essentially constant ever since—the Boeing 787 cruises just a few percent faster than the 707” (IEEE Spectrum)
16. Therapy and companionship were the top reported uses of generative AI in 2025. (HBR)
17. Over the past century, the length of Oscar speeches has ballooned, peaking in the 2010s at almost 300 words per speech. (Stephen Follows)
18. The number of bourbon distilleries in the US went from 75 in 2006 to nearly 2,300 by 2022. (Flyover Stocks)
19. The rate of deforestation in the Amazon has halved in the last three years. (Sustainability by Numbers)
20. More than half of the volume of S&P 500 options traded are those that expire on the same day. These have low premiums and offer very high leverage (up to 400x). On average, the expected payout is -32,000%. (BIS)
21. Humans throughput information at 10 bits per second, so “Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition.” (Zhen and Meister)
22. Mammals and non-human primates follow a clear scaling of body mass to brain mass. Humanoids break that trend. (Manger et al)
23. “The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury lived an interesting life. “His mother was Churchill’s personal secretary, married a businessman, had an affair with Churchill’s other secretary, and Justin was the result (he didn’t learn this until he was 60!). He went to Cambridge, had a mystical experience that converted him to Christianity, worked for an oil company in Nigeria for 11 years, then quit to get ordained as a priest.” (Wikipedia)
24. “People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch.“ (Keneth Hendricks)
25. 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.” (Tom Whitwell)
26. Today, a simple vial of blood can be used to measure more than 13,000 different proteins; ten years ago, this was nearly zero. (Stifel)