16 Interesting Things from April 2026
Notes, Oddities, and Arguments That Do Not Deserve a Full Post
It is (practically) impossible to eat at every restaurant in New York City. Some places on the internet will claim it would take 22 years (for example, here, here, and the Google AI summary). But this seems to be a dramatic understatement. They’re assuming all restaurants are on OpenTable, but the website only has ~8,000 restaurants. The NYC Department of Public Health inspected 27,000 restaurants in 2019! At one a day, that would be 74 years!
In NYC, the subway typically runs 10-40ft feet below ground. The subway in Philadelphia is much shallower, some even right below the street as they were constructed using the “cut-and-cover” method, meaning they are located immediately under the roadway. Meanwhile, the DC subway runs in the 40-100ft range (figured from ChatGPT). While the DC subways are deeper than NYC and Philadelphia, they are also more aesthetically pleasing (ie the vaulted concrete ceilings) and cleaner. The latter is based on my personal experience, but the dozen or so NYC and Philadelphia subway stations I passed through were filthy.
Google Maps blurs out the Statue of Liberty’s face from certain angles…
But not others
“A famous financial anomaly is that the stock market mostly goes up when it’s closed: “Over at least the past three decades, investors have earned 100% or more of the return on a wide range of risky assets when the markets are closed, and, as sure as day follows night, have earned zero or negative returns for bearing the risk of owning those assets during the daytime, when markets are open,” as Victor Haghani, Vladimir Ragulin and Richard Dewey have put it. That is, stocks tend broadly to open higher than they closed the previous day, and then to go down a bit during the trading day. Nobody quite knows why. Bruce Knuteson has a famous theory, laid out in papers with titles like “Strikingly Suspicious Overnight and Intraday Returns,” “They Chose to Not Tell You,” “Nothing to See Here” and “They Still Haven’t Told You,” that quantitative trading firms conspire to inflate prices every morning and deflate them every evening. My own crude intuitive assumption is that, because US public companies try not to release information during market hours, most of the fundamental information that causes stocks to rise over the long run is in fact released and assimilated at night. But that is not very rigorous, and nobody else seems to believe it.”
YouTube told me that you should never throw away an uncracked egg on a nuclear submarine because many uncracked eggs cracking at once in the trash will cause sonar detection. That’s a lie.
Nataliia Khodemchuk was the widow of Valerii Khodemchuk, the first victim of the Chornobyl disaster. She was killed on November 15, 2025, by a Russian drone strike on her Kyiv home. You don’t hate Russia enough.
More on Ukraine: Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska solved the sphere-packing problem in 8 and 24 dimensions. That work was later extended to show “how an infinite number of points repelling each other are placed in 8- and 24-dimensional spaces.”
Math Files@Math_filesUkrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska solved a problem that had puzzled mathematicians for over 400 years. Even Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton couldn’t crack it. We live in a three-dimensional world, but Maryna solved a puzzle in an eight-dimensional space—something that’s
10:30 PM · Apr 25, 2026 · 621K Views302 Replies · 5.01K Reposts · 21.4K LikesCabbage is 92% to 93% water. Why would people expect it to catch on fire easily?
More debunking of populist popfitness nonsense. Partially melting and rehardening chocolate breaks its crystal structure (creating this structure is why chocolate has to be tempered). Because of this, it will no longer act like chocolate normally would act.
Marx thought he disproved calculus.
Kane 謝凱堯@kaneMarx thought calculus was fake because he thought he had disproven derivatives.
Red Operative Leninist @RedPill_MarxismAmericans realizing Marx was right about EVERYTHING. https://t.co/mWag0urkiF1:45 AM · Apr 26, 2026 · 1.62M Views275 Replies · 1.89K Reposts · 26.2K LikesFrom the Grey Lady: France Investigates Temperature Spikes That Led to Big Payouts on Polymarket
“Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.”
There is a Rolex museum and a vibrant black market for Rolex parts to create Frankenwatches.
Canadians saying words like “out” and “about” like “oot” and “aboot” is a key part of the American stereotype of the country. It’s known as “Canadian raising” and is more common in Ontario and eastern Canada.
A random facebook post on this I came aboot Why Diego Garcia almost entirely avoided the 2005 Indian Ocean Tsunami:
“The Navy reports that more than anything else, “favorable ocean topography” minimized the tsunami’s impact on the atoll. Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Archipelago, which extends north from the Maldives. To the east lies the Chagos Trench, a 400-mile-long underwater canyon that ranges in depth from about 3,000 feet below the surface to 15,000 feet. It is one of the deepest regions in the Indian Ocean.
“The depth of the Chagos Trench and grade to the shores does not allow for tsunamis to build before passing the atoll. The result of the earthquake was seen as a tidal surge estimated at 6 feet,” according to a Navy fact sheet.”
Your Hometown Deli was a New Jersey Deli worth over $100 million despite only going $25,000 in sales. Yes, fraud was involved.
Are we closing in on flying cars? Some headlines…
Joby Air Taxi makes Bay Area flight in FAA commercial approval push
Electric air taxis take off from Manhattan for first New York airport trips
From the second headline:
“An all-electric aircraft has flown demonstration flights from Manhattan to John F. Kennedy International Airport, something the operator hopes will become an everyday occurrence at locations around the world.”
