2025 - TYIL

The more I learn, the more I realise that I know nothing

As the year 2025 AD winds down its time to draw up a list of some totally irrelevant things which I learnt during its course (or rather remembered to list).

1. 1st January 2025 – marks the arrival of Gen Beta [Wikipedia]
2. Haj Notes: Special notes issued by RBI but valid as legal tender only in the Gulf Nations of UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman [DNA] 
3. Jolly Grant Airport (Dehradun) gets it name from the “Grant” of the village Jauli (anglicized to Jolly) to the British by Nepal.
4. Sygyzy: Literally a case of heavenly bodies aligning [Wikipedia] 
5. Octothorpe the official name for the hashtag symbol (#) [Merriam-Webster] 
6. Ramanujam Summation: The sum of natural numbers – 1+2+3+4….+ till infinity is -1/12. Unbelievable as it may sound, it is derivable! [Link] 
7. Jevons Paradox: when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); the cost of using the resource drops, and hence the overall demand increases causing total resource consumption to rise. [Wikipedia] 
8. Faulty (English) & Faltu (Hindi) have the same etymological root – Falto (Portuguese) [Wiktionary] 
9. Ulaanbaatar (capital of Mongolia) means “Red Hero”, in honour of the Russian help in getting Mongolia’s independence. [Britannica] 
10. Belphegor’s Prime Number: a palindromic prime number 1000000000000066600000000000001, named after Belphegor, one of the seven princes of Hell, due to the superstitious significance of the number 666 and the surrounding 13 zeros [Wikipedia] 
11. Caissan Constant: the number of legal chess positions. And Caissan is the Goddess of Chess [Link] 
12. The province of Luxembourg in Belgium is larger in area than the neighboring country of Luxembourg with which it shares its name! [Wikipedia] 
13. Pentagon Pizza Index: A surge in pizza orders near Pentagon signals that an attack is imminent in some part of the world [Economic Times] and there is a dedicated Twitter account for tracking the pizza orders [Twitter] 
14. Alan Smithee: the pseudonym adopted for director’s credit in a movie whose actual director does not want their name associated with it. Turns out Alan Smithee is the most prolific director in movie history! [IMDB] 
15. Sneakers are named so because they can quietly move around unlike the leather shoes of those times
16. Philip Noel-Baker: only person till date to win the Nobel Prize (Peace, 1959) and an Olympics medal (1,500 m Silver in 1920) [Wikipedia]
17. The ubiquitous CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart [Link]
18. Euler’s Identity – also referred to as the most beautiful mathematics equation [YouTube]

Another short list this year, but it is 1 Trivia longer than last year's [so definitely an improvement.#LittleWins]

P.S. Lists from 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 & 2024