TIL that a billionaire bought Lonely Planet and put an inexperienced 24 year old wedding photographer in charge (www.nbcnews.com)
Colorado city of Loveland is hub of postal activity each Valentine’s Day (www.theguardian.com)
TIL Germany sometimes used VW Beetles as police cars (www.caranddriver.com)
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 In the 1920s Russian scientist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a human-chimpanzee hybrid. Both attempts at inseminating chimpanzees with human sperm and women with ape sperm failed. (en.m.wikipedia.org)
TIL That the Christian SNES Game 'Super Noah's Ark 3D' Started Out as a Video Game Adaptation of 'Hellraiser' and Used the Wolfenstein 3D Engine (dubvee.org)
Of all the random Wikipedia articles I stumble upon, this one definitely had me saying, “wait, what?” more than once....
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 the original Star Wars trilogy was influenced by the Vietnam War (www.cbr.com)
TIL why YouTube buffers when my network is fine. Set network to prefer IPv4 or disable IPv6 (learn.microsoft.com)
I have 2ms ping to YouTube and my network is wired 1gbit so it was odd to get so many buffering issues. So i did a search and this solution immediately solved the buffering issue! Prefer IPv4 or disable IPv6 and it’s buttery smooth
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 JSFuck, an esoteric subset of JS that only uses operators, could be used to hack eBay customers by injecting it into item listings. As JSFuck obfuscated the actual code, attackers were able to get browsers that see the listing to run external scripts. (arstechnica.com)
This news is from almost exactly 8 years ago. Softpedia reported 13 days later that eBay partially patched it, but the patch was insufficient. I could not find further updates, but I do know that eBay has since removed more advanced JavaScript (incl. JSFuck) from all listings in 2017....
TIL the word 'lox' (smoked salmon) is the oldest word in the English language- unchanged in meaning and pronunciation for 8,000 years (nautil.us)
it’s also yummy
TIL about SearXNG -- search like the old days where you get relevant results instead of a page half full of weird nonsense (searx.envs.net)
TIL Gargoyles are named that because of the water they gargle out of their mouths. (www.merriam-webster.com)
Proper use of the term gargoyle being the statues that drain water from buildings....
TIL About How 11 Lines of Code Supported Web Development and the Code Was Deleted It Broke the Internet (getpocket.com)
TIL about Earl Silverman, a domestic abuse survivor who founded a shelter for men. It was denied funding from the government and he was ridiculed. The shelter went bankrupt and he died by suicide (en.m.wikipedia.org)
TIL Banksy snuck "cave art" into the British Museum as a hoax in 2005 and then they put it on display for real in 2018. (www.bbc.com)
Peckham Rock, essentially a lump of concrete showing a supposed prehistoric figure pushing a shopping trolley, was smuggled into the venue in 2005. It stayed for three days before staff realised it didn’t belong there....
TIL the USA is the only country to not have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL Cass Elliot died in Harry Nilsson's apartment, and four years later Keith Moon died in the same room (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL a guide dog named Roselle led a group of people including her blind owner down 78 flights of stairs before the North Tower collapsed on 9/11. (wikiless.tiekoetter.com)
She only stopped to give kisses to a woman who was having a panic attack.
TIL that the top soccer league in Spain is officially known as "LaLiga EA Sports" (en.m.wikipedia.org)
TIL; in the US state of Georgia Immigrants are ok, as long as they can be exploited by business owners. (www.theatlantic.com)
Georgia prevents immigrants, causing millions of dollars of crops to rot. changes course to allow immigrants. still against immigration somehow.
TIL that Die Hard received mixed reviews upon release. Critics didn't like Bruce Willis' performance, action and violence (en.m.wikipedia.org)
TIL Keiko, the orca from Free Willy, is buried in a grave in Norway (www.atlasobscura.com)
TIL In the Hot Coffee lawsuit against McDonalds,punitive damages were given due to McDonalds intentionally overheating coffee to save money on refills (www.poolelg.com)
During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not...
