The 2025 Washington plane crash showed that air traffic control is run by people not numbers. On the day, only one air traffic control worker was managing the Reagan National Airport tower – a job normally done by two people – which meant they were unable to co-ordinate all relevant departures safely. In fact a separate analysis has shown that 90% of all US airport towers are understaffed.
Geography
The US accounts for one third of all the world’s airports, with over 15,000 to it’s name, but the vast majority of countries have fewer than 100.
Anguilla, a tiny British island territory in the Caribbean, brings in up to $30 million in revenue each year by licencing its ‘.ai’ domain name to other companies.
The China playbook: go from bottom to top in a matter of years.
Half the world’s GDP comes from 4% of its land mass.
Actually, London gets 562mm per year on average: a bit less than Malta (592mm) and Rome (586mm), and about half of the annual average of Sydney (1,222mm) or New York (1,059mm).
The London Underground Map says the quickest route from Lancaster Gate to Paddington is to travel two stops, change lines, and travel two more. As anyone familiar with the area knows, it’s much quicker to ditch the Tube and walk – the 500 metre journey between the stations takes seven minutes.
Our customary map of the world, the Mercator projection, is wildly inaccurate. Africa appears to be the same size as Greenland, when in fact it is 14 times larger. Antarctica seems to be the biggest continent, but it’s actually the third smallest and dwarfed by both the Americas. The map was first used by explorers because it preserves angles and shapes (for navigation), but as a result it massively distorts the size of land masses.
Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its national income from licensing its ‘.tv’ domain to streaming platforms like Twitch.