TIL that Wyoming is larger than the United Kingdom in area but less populous than Glasgow
Wyoming Area: 253,335 km2...
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)
TIL the term Redneck likely originated from the sunburned red neck of those working in fields. (en.wikipedia.org)
The term originally characterized farmers that had a red neck, caused by sunburn from long hours working in the fields. A citation from 1893 provides a definition as “poorer inhabitants of the rural districts … men who work in the field, as a matter of course, generally have their skin stained red and burnt by the sun, and...
TIL you can improve your google search result by adding "before:2023" (mastodon.social)
TIL about this tool, the *Reinigungsschaber* ! (lemmy.world)
I had lost hope with my electric cooking plates. The white circles where completely hidden under a layer of diamond-grade burn residue that no amount of scrubbing with chemicals could even begin to remove. I found this 3€ scrapping tool and it’s amazing !!! Sorry, but I don’t have the before picture, believe me after 6...
TIL in Australia the name of the band "AC/DC" is pronounced "Acca Dacca" (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL about the "'New York Times problem'—the dilemma of indicting Assange for the very same kind of investigative journalism that mainstream media engages frequently" (www.newsweek.com)
Two of us, Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, testified for Assange at his extradition hearing last year. In Ellsberg’s words then, the WikiLeaks publications that Assange is being charged for are “amongst the most important truthful revelations of hidden criminal state behavior that have been made public in U.S. history.” The...
TIL the FBI struggled to hire hackers because of a rule that required applicants to have not smoked marijuana for the past 3 years (www.nydailynews.com)
TIL the adjective 'daily' in the lord's prayer is actually written in the original Greek as *epiousion*, which occurs nowhere else in known history (en.wikipedia.org)
the full line being “Give us today our epiousion bread”...
TIL the U.S. Civil War is called "The Slave War" in Icelandic (lemmy.world)
TIL that Die Hard received mixed reviews upon release. Critics didn't like Bruce Willis' performance, action and violence (en.m.wikipedia.org)
TIL that in the US, liberal adolescents are much more likely to experience depression than their conservative counterparts. This divergence in depression rates only started recently and is growing (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
TIL about exploding head syndrome, which causes patients to hear a loud, frightening noise when falling asleep or waking up. Up to 10% of people may have it, but cases often go undiagnosed (en.wikipedia.org)
cross-posted from: lemmit.online/post/2659121
TIL Alice Walton (Walmart heir) killed a pedestrian in a driving accident and was never charged. She has also been arrested for DUI twice but never charged. (en.wikipedia.org)
The sketchy part is not her not getting convicted. It’s that no charges were even filed. I also enjoyed this bit of info from one of the sources regarding the other DUI incident. Prosecutors in Texas have dropped a 2011 drunken driving citation against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. heiress Alice Walton.
TIL eating 1 gram polar bear liver can be fatal due to an overdose of vitamin A that makes your skin fall off (animals.howstuffworks.com)
A healthy human liver contains 575 international units (IU) of vitamin A per gram while a polar bear’s liver contains between 24,000 and 35,000 IU per gram. Compare that to the tolerable upper level of vitamin A intake for a healthy adult human: 10,000. Signs of toxicity generally occur when approximately 25,000 to 33,000 IU...
TIL the military cannot enlist a recruit with an IQ measured lower than 80 and is required to keep enlisted individuals with an IQ of 81-92 to less than 20% of the armed forces in active duty. (www.law.cornell.edu)
(a)The number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in any armed force during any fiscal year whose score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the tenth percentile and below the thirty-first percentile may not exceed 20 percent of the total...
TIL that during the filming of Borat, Police was called 90+ times (www.youtube.com)
And the FBI was assigned to follow the film team on reports of a “vaguely middle-eastern man with a bear in an ice-crem truck”, which has to be the funniest report xD
TIL the trump campaign directed collaborators to forge and mail in false 2020 electoral documents to try to trick the national archives into certifying trump as the victor in states he lost to Biden. (people.com)
I came across a post in a Michigan community that mentioned this, and i asked if it really happened because it seems so crazy that Republican collaborators would directly mail in fake documents saying Trump won states he lost and I hadn’t even really heard about it....
TIL states that passed laws allowing a married person to seek a divorce without the consent of their spouse saw female suicide decline by 20 percent (www.nber.org)
TIL About How 11 Lines of Code Supported Web Development and the Code Was Deleted It Broke the Internet (getpocket.com)
TIL that Jim Carrey was paid $7 million for ''Dumb and Dumber'', while his co-star Jeff Daniels made just $50,000 (www.yahoo.com)
TIL That the entirety of Wikipedia is only ~100Gb and you can download it for offline use
In light of the recent Crowdstrike crash revealing how weak points in IT infrastructure can have wide ranging effects, I figured this might be an interesting one....
TIL there is no original TI-84 as the TI-84 Plus was an upgrade (like iPhone 14 to 13) to the TI-83 Plus (en.wikipedia.org)
And yes, TI calculators have indeed been improving, apparently....
TIL DuoLingo offers language courses for Klingon and High Valyrian (lemmy.world)
tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaH!
TIL in the Carboniferous Period, no fungus existed to decompose trees. They just grew on top of each other up and up.
The weight of the trees was so great that the ones on the bottom got squished and became coal. That’s where coal is from. Bonus fact: the whole time this was happening, sharks were hunting in the oceans. Sharks are older than trees and fungus!