* And you can, too, at shanesnow.com/mario.

* Excluding political appointments. And Gerald Ford’s 25 years in federal politics skews the average; the median is seven.

* These are all actual winnings reported to me by Brigham Young students. There’s even a myth that someone once brought back a used car in Bigger or Better. And in 2005, a little farther north, a young Canadian man named Kyle MacDonald famously played an Internet-based game of Bigger or Better where he started with a red paperclip and eventually traded up to a house after 12 months and 14 trades.

* For a deeper read on this, visit shanesnow.com/cycletime.

* Dates approximate, especially for pre-Revolutionary War officeholders.

* Some studies have indicated that as many as 50 percent of patients had some sort of cognitive decline after the surgery.

* On that note: core to the Second City improv training is a concept called “Yes, and.” On stage, when an actor says something unfunny and another actor says “no” or allows him to fail, a scene instantly loses its humor. “Yes, and” says that no matter how ridiculous or terrible another actor’s line, the other actor’s job is to validate the premise and then to say “and . . .” and to twist it to something else. This converts failure into humor.

* Upworthy has spawned dozens of imitators who have since applied its techniques to rather sneaky and cynical content. Such exploitation certainly seems more like a shortcut than a long-term smartcut, an unfortunate side effect of Upworthy’s success.

* Mine included.

* Programmers will tell you that some computer processing speed is sacrificed when you program at higher levels. But since writing code in C is a thousand times faster than binary, it pays off.

* Dudley Underwood of DePauw University put it well: “If 70% of engineers don’t need calculus to do their jobs, then how many of the 500,000 students that we put through every year will?”

* The original version of this oft-misattributed quote appears to be from a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous handbook.

* Everyone says it was Seuss, but the original reference is elusive.

* It should be noted that Finland’s international rankings dropped a few slots in 2013. Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn about Educational Change in Finland, attributes the slip to complacency from being at the top for so long, and the rise of other countries copying and improving on Finland’s platform.

* There’s argument as to whether a mass of creative people precedes economic growth in cities; that’s a causation-versus-correlation question. But data is clear that big cities are better places for creative people to create and inventors to invent.

* Superconnectors are a subset of the “Connectors” Malcolm Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point, people whose many acquaintances span social circles and who can facilitate in the spreading of ideas and epidemics. While Connectors are often passive links between groups, superconnectors actively use their networks to help individuals reach many people at once. For a bonus discussion on Gladwell and superconnectors, check out shanesnow.com/superconnectors.

* Though we have to give Abrams credit for being a memorable storyteller, too.

* Full disclosure: I freelanced as a designer and writer for Mint during this time.

* Sadly, that’s not hard to beat at the time of this writing. A 2013 poll found that the 112th Congress was less popular than cockroaches, root canals, lice, carnies, colonoscopies, and Nickelback.

* Full disclosure: Paley is one of my own investors.

* A typical lead time for a tweet was often over a week. In an extreme case, a large life insurance company told my firm in 2013 that it would take 12 months to approve a blog post and that the lawyers would be suggesting edits via fax.

* Musk loves biographies and autobiographies. (Serial inventor Ben Franklin’s are his favorite.) But in this case, he bought books on rocket science.

* See the video at shanesnow.com/falcon1.