TIL about the concept of Weaponized Incompetence, which probably explains every issue you ever faced in a bureaucracy (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL that the white stuff that sometimes appears on chocolate is called "chocolate bloom". (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL: There is a sculpture with four cryptic passages in it that stands outside the CIA's George Bush Center for Intelligence in Virginia (en.wikipedia.org)
3 out of the 4 passages have solutions to date.
TIL almost all vanilla plants are pollinated by hand. (en.wikipedia.org)
I was reading about Edmond Albius, the former slave who learned how to pollinate the vanilla plant (at age 12!), which is why we have commercial vanilla today....
TIL that a short film named "100 Years" starring John Malkovich was shot in 2015, destined to be released in the year 2115 (en.wikipedia.org)
100 Years is apparently a short film. Rodriguez stated in a 2019 interview:...
TIL about Swatch Internet Time, a decimal time system that has no time zones. (en.wikipedia.org)
I feel that this is what we should be using instead of the current illogical time system.
TIL Joseph Stalin was struck by a sport carriage and severely injured at age 12, which a certain source cited by the Simple English Wikipedia took as his father dying in a drunken brawl (en.wikipedia.org)
The incorrect book. Note that his father only died in 1909 of liver issues. Jughashvili was upset when he learned that Keke had enrolled Ioseb in school, instead hoping his son would follow his path and become a cobbler. This led to a major incident in January 1890. Ioseb had been struck by a phaeton, severely injuring him....
TIL Cass Elliot died in Harry Nilsson's apartment, and four years later Keith Moon died in the same room (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL the USA is the only country to not have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (en.wikipedia.org)
100 years ago, Vladimir Lenin died (en.wikipedia.org)
100 years ago, Vladimir Lenin died (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL a Canadian from Greece took an American version of an Italian dish and added tropical fruit to it and called it a Hawaiian pizza. (en.wikipedia.org)
The history of the term Generation X is complicated and confusing. Boomers were the original Generation X. (en.wikipedia.org)
The term Generation X has been used at various times to describe alienated youth. In the early 1950s, Hungarian photographer Robert Capa first used Generation X as the title for a photo-essay about young men and women growing up immediately following World War II. The term first appeared in print in a December 1952 issue of...
TIL that Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Franz Ferdinand, died of Tuberculosis three years and ten months after the assassination. (en.wikipedia.org)
Princip was nineteen years old at the time and too young to be executed, as he was twenty-seven days shy of the twenty-year minimum age limit required by Habsburg law.[43] On Thursday 28 October 1914 the court found Princip guilty of murder and high treason, he received the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison...
TIL: There is a breed of goat that is half black and half white -- The Valais Blackneck goat (en.wikipedia.org)
(Full disclosure, I learned this yesterday.)...
til Don Pardo worked as announcer on SNL until his death, age 96! (en.wikipedia.org)
Dominick George "Don" Pardo Jr. (February 22, 1918 – August 18, 2014) was an American radio and television announcer whose career spanned more than seven decades. A member of the Television Hall of Fame, Pardo was noted for his 70-year tenure with NBC, working as the announcer for early incarnations of such notable shows as...
Wikipedia traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2023 (en.wikipedia.org)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…/Traffic_report...
TIL on 29 April 2013, scientists reported that during spaceflight microbes seem to adapt to the space environment in ways "not observed on Earth" (en.wikipedia.org)
and in ways that “can lead to increases in growth and virulence”....
TIL that operating system Linux is an example of anarcho-communism (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL that operating system Linux is an example of anarcho-communism (en.wikipedia.org)
2023 in science (en.wikipedia.org)
For reflection on science and its results and reviews of the year in science....
TIL that the two people to have been the oldest when serving as POTUS are Joe Biden and Donald Trump (en.wikipedia.org)
This is based on their age at the beginning of their term....
Liquidation of Wikimedia RU [Wikipedia Signpost] (en.wikipedia.org)
Briefly: Stanislav Kozlovsky, the director of Russian Wikimedia project (which supports the Russian Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc.), has been declared a “foreign agent” by Russia. He has been forced to resign from his job at the Moscow State University. Following the event, Russian Wikimedia has decided to dissolve...
Nomic, one of the best concepts of a game I've seen (en.wikipedia.org)
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/7647192...