Fifty Random Things I Learned in 2025
Taking responsibility for your professional development is key to your future success. If you are reading this, you are likely working in environmental health and safety and much of your professional development is probably linked to these topics in the workplace. While that is necessary and admirable, it's also important to learn things outside your professional domain since often, ideas from one area can be tweaked or directly applied to other areas of our life. In 2025, I kept track of new things I was learning or diving deeper into. If you read through the list below, you will see that these things are really random and when I was putting this list together, I realized how much I had forgotten. If you subscribe to The Safety Training Net, you know that repetition is a key to retention. Planning a time to review what you have learned, no matter how random, is going to help "Make it Stick."
Here's the list. If there is anything you'd like to know more about, just let me know.
Fifty Random Things I Learned in 2025
1. The Great Wave by Hokusai - A famous Japanese woodblock print showing a towering wave dwarfing tiny people and a fragile boat, emphasizing nature’s power over humans.
2. Virtue signaling - The act of publicly expressing moral values primarily to demonstrate one’s goodness or social alignment rather than to effect real change.
3. Why the sky is bluer in fall and leaves change color - Clearer air scatters light differently in fall, deepening blue skies, while reduced chlorophyll reveals red and yellow leaf pigments.
4. Uber/Lyft fraud - A range of scams involving fake rides, identity misuse, or payment manipulation affecting drivers, riders, or platforms.
5. Accuracy of fitness trackers - Fitness trackers estimate metrics like steps and heart rate reasonably well but can be less accurate for calories, sleep, and certain activities.
6. Landscape of consciousness - A metaphor describing consciousness as a dynamic terrain of mental states, awareness levels, and subjective experiences.
7. Naismith’s Rule for walking time - A hiking guideline estimating travel time based on distance and elevation gain.
8. Rules of thumb for remaining daylight - A visual method using fingers or a fist at arm’s length to estimate how much daylight remains before sunset.
9. Petrichor - The earthy smell after rain, produced by plant oils and bacteria, which humans can detect at lower concentrations than sharks detect blood.
10. Spicy food politics - How preferences for spicy food intersect with culture, identity, migration, and power.
11. Institutional neutrality - The principle that institutions should avoid taking positions on contested social or political issues unrelated to their core mission.
12. Greek burials - Ancient Greek burial practices reflected beliefs about honor, the afterlife, and social status.
13. Lucid dreams - Dreams in which the dreamer becomes aware they are dreaming and may influence the dream’s events.
14. Regression to the mean - The tendency for extreme outcomes to be followed by more average ones, especially when chance plays a role.
15. The genetic superiority of women - A shorthand for the idea that women’s two X chromosomes provide greater genetic resilience and redundancy.
16. Anatomical planes - Coronal planes divide the body front to back, while sagittal planes divide it into left and right halves.
17. ACHOO syndrome - A genetic condition causing people to sneeze when exposed to bright light.
18. Sapere aude - A philosophical call meaning “dare to know,” encouraging independent thinking and intellectual courage.
19. Potassium and sodium balance - Potassium helps counteract sodium by promoting its excretion and supporting healthy blood pressure.
20. Dual coding - A learning strategy that combines words and visuals to improve understanding and memory.
21. Meniscal tears and treatment - Types of knee cartilage injuries and surgical repair
22. Fermi- izing problems - Estimating complex questions by breaking them into smaller, more tractable components.
23. Fox vs. Hedgehog thinking - A contrast between flexible thinkers who integrate many ideas (foxes) and rigid thinkers who rely on one big idea (hedgehogs).
24. Bayesian thinking - Updating beliefs gradually as new evidence becomes available.
25. “Labeling parts of the heart technique” - A skill- building method that improves understanding by precisely identifying and naming components.
26. Who Not How - A mindset focused on finding the right people to help accomplish goals instead of figuring out everything yourself.
27. Cloud Thinking - A noticing practice that encourages seeing patterns, connections, and metaphors in everyday environments.
28. Octavio Paz’s philosophical writings - Reflections on solitude, identity, and death, including how isolation can compound itself and how cultures ritualize mortality.
29. HackerRank and GitLab - Platforms used for coding assessment, collaboration, and software development workflows.
30. Tribonucleation - The physical process by which small gas bubbles form when surfaces in liquid separate, as in knuckle cracking.
31. Glucose management with CGMs - Using continuous glucose monitors to learn how food order and exercise affect blood sugar levels.
32. Stress Science 101 - A skills- based approach to stress resilience focused on attention, mindset, and achievable goal- setting.
33. Low- Intensity Continuous Ultrasound Therapy - A treatment that uses sound waves to stimulate tissue healing, especially in bone injuries.
34. Chiasmus - A rhetorical device that mirrors or reverses sentence structure for emphasis and memorability.
35. Solvitur ambulando - The idea that problems can be solved through walking and movement.
36. PAO system - A memory technique that encodes information using vivid person- action- object imagery.
37. 6 box thinking (mindboxing) - A structured thinking method that separates ideas into distinct mental categories to reduce overload.
38. Eswatini - The African nation formerly known as Swaziland, renamed to reflect its indigenous identity.
39. Uncle Sam - A national personification of the United States derived from the abbreviation “U.S.” for United States.
40. Order of operations in survival - A prioritization framework focusing first on immediate threats like air, shelter, and water.
41. Gorpcore - A fashion trend inspired by outdoor gear, named after trail mix (“Good Old Raisins and Peanuts”).
42. The December effect - The idea that constraints and deadlines can lead to clearer priorities and better leadership decisions.
43. Cults - Groups characterized by extreme control, isolation, unquestionable authority, and suppression of dissent.
44. Keynesian beauty contest - A metaphor for decision- making based on predicting others’ preferences rather than intrinsic value.
45. Intergenerational fluency - The ability to communicate and collaborate effectively across age groups.
46. Paris Syndrome - A psychological condition where visitors experience distress when reality fails to match idealized expectations of Paris.
47. Discrepant event strategies - Teaching methods that use surprising outcomes to provoke curiosity and deeper learning.
48. Effective context engineering for AI agents - Designing prompts, instructions, and constraints that guide AI behavior more reliably.
49. Folding fitted sheets - A practical method for neatly folding elastic- edged sheets despite their irregular shape.
50. The physics of baseball pitches - The study of how spin, air pressure, and velocity influence pitch movement and behavior.
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