Commented

TIL the writers of "Take me Out to the Ball Game" had never seen a baseball game (historyfacts.com)

TIL there's a rich history of conspiracy theories centered around Denver International Airport (history.denverlibrary.org)

TIL there was an unreleased comic book in which Marvel superhero Captain Britain would resolve The Troubles by having everyone drink "magic civilizing tea" (www.eruditorumpress.com)

TIL that in the 1860s one meaning of "Trump" was "A good fellow; an excellent person". (archive.org)

Maybe the “great” America that Donald wants to take us back to is the 1860s?

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 The Smallest Computer in the World Fits On a Grain of Rice (ece.engin.umich.edu)

TIL about a collection of math problems, known as “The Millennium Problems” that will earn the solver a $1 million prize (www.claymath.org)

A collection of mysterious and unsolved math problems, also known as “The Millennium Problems” are 7 extremely challenging and complex mathematical problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Solving any of these problems would not only advance our understanding of mathematics but also earn the solver a...

TIL - "Mage" derives from Magush, the old persian name for Zoroastrian priests, which means "Fire worshipper" (en.wikipedia.org)

Wasn’t actually today, but it’s an interesting etymology. Old Arabian speaks “majus” because they lack a hard G sound, similar to Japanese lacking L sound...

TIL rabies is an STD (www.ebervet.com)

[TIL] The worst shark attack in history (getpocket.com)

The USS Indianapolis had delivered the crucial components of the first operational atomic bomb to a naval base on the Pacific island of Tinian. On August 6, 1945, the weapon would level Hiroshima. But now, on July 28, the Indianapolis sailed from Guam, without an escort, to meet the battleship USS Idaho in the Leyte Gulf in the...

Today I learned you can run doom from motherboard BIOS. (www.pcgamer.com)

Idk how many other games you can do this with but I thought it was interesting.

TIL about raisin juice concentrate - some truly Goldbergian food science (www.delightedcooking.com)

TIL about "America Against America," a fascinating book on US culture and institutions by a Chinese investigator looking in from the outside in 1988. (www.astralcodexten.com)

The reason for such a statute to coordinate dogs and cats is also because of the different interests that exist. Americans, some love dogs and cats to death, and some hate them to death. So, in order to reconcile the two, there must be regulations. I witnessed a family whose dog ran onto a neighbor's lawn to play, and the owner...

TIL three of the richest counties in the US are Washington DC suburbs (www.kiplinger.com)

TIL: How Opioid sales quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, with 91 Americans dying daily from opioid overdoses (medium.com)

TIL: The Chicken soup for the soul publisher owns redbox (www.foxbusiness.com)

TIL Catwoman canonically has a sidekick (batman.fandom.com)

TIL: Eating pine nuts can occasionally cause some people to experience a bitter or metallic taste lasting from a few days up to 2 weeks (www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au)

The symptoms normally disappear after several days and there are no adverse health effects....

TIL: You can enter into Immersive Reader mode in (Microsoft) Edge to reduce the number of things and CSS displayed on the screen. Great for when you need to study. (support.microsoft.com)

I found mine at the right end of the URL bar....

TIL Ecuador has constitutional protections for the rights of nature, and those protections are actively determining environmental legal cases. (amp.theguardian.com)

A landmark case was won in 2021 ruling against the rights of a mining company to mine los cedros’ cloud forest, a high altitude rainforest, because it would harm the biodiversity of the area....

TIL Germany sometimes used VW Beetles as police cars (www.caranddriver.com)

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