fun facts for the next time someone asks

Hedonic Treadmill : Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.

Weasel Words : Phrases that appear to have meaning but convey nothing tangible. “Growth was solid last quarter,” or “Many people believe.”

Compassion Fade : People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.

Anscombe’s Quartet : Four sets of numbers that look identical on paper (mean average, variance, correlation, etc.) but look completely different when graphed. Describes a situation where exact calculations don’t offer a good representation of how the world works.

Perhaps because names are so crucial and personal, naming things can feel uniquely human. And until a little over a decade ago, scientists predominantly thought that was true. Then, in 2013, a study suggested that bottlenose dolphins use namelike calls. Scientists have since found evidence that parrots, and perhaps whales and bats, use calls that i... See more

Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.

India had fewer than 10 billionaires two decades ago, when Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother first appeared on the Forbes billionaire list after their father, company founder Dhirubhai Ambani, died. Now, the country is the world’s third-biggest source of billionaires after China and the U.S.

India’s 200 billionaires have a combined net worth of... See more

According to data from Forbes, there were 2,781 billionaires worldwide as of March. The combined net worth of U.S. billionaires totals $5.7 trillion, more than any other country. China’s billionaires rank second, worth $1.3 trillion, and India’s billionaires rank third at $954 billion.

One could also be “crushed” — broken down or destroyed — by sadness or stress, for example. Kory Stamper, a senior editor of lexicography at Dictionary.com, said this figurative sense of “crush” developed alongside the literal meaning. “The historical record is full of the crush of melancholy, the crush of despondency, the crush of death,” Ms. Stam... See more