Monday 4 January 2021

in the public interest

Untethered to a particular year (otherwise we’d be reluctant to dip our toes in the recent past), we enjoyed this piece from the New York Times Insider section—via Digg—as a final year-end list for 2020 of seventy-four favourite facts gleaned and cited in the articles that they came from—see also. It’s a fun read-through and we liked re-encountering the concept of “pants drunk” and Bayesian logic, and especially enjoyed learning the delightful fact that unique among their kind when “ants of the species Myrmecina graminicola encounter danger while on a slope, they tuck into a ball and roll away” and that the form of protest in Latin America that involves pot-banging (see also) is called cacerolazo—the Spanish word for casserole. Let us know your favourite new fact.