til

TIL that at age 17, in 1980, Jodie Foster already had a decent handle on why some in the US are so thick about the situation in Palestine (www.interviewmagazine.com)

JODIE: The reason it has been difficult for the United States to understand the Palestinian side is not only because of the media but because colonialism is in our history. We can’t face the fact that colonialism is wrong and that it steps on a lot of toes and hurts a lot of people.

TIL that the original Bozo the Clown(1946) Pinto Colvig, had a son, Vance Colvig Jr., who landed the job of Bozo in the first local TV station to franchise the character in 1959. (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL In the 1800s, individuals secured government jobs through connections to presidents, not by merit. This practice ended after a disgruntled job-seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, (www.americanhistorycentral.com)

TIL about William Phelps Eno. He invented traffic regulations, the stop sign, the crosswalk, the roundabout, the one-way street and pedestrian safety islands. He never learned how to drive. (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL about the Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violina, a musical instrument that combined a player piano and three violins! (www.yourclassical.org)

Perplexica - locally hosted AI search engine (glukhov.au)

how to install it, how it compares to other engines and how to choose right LLM for it

TIL about Tuffi the elephant. In 1950 Tuffi the elephant survived a fall from the suspended railway (Schwebebahn) into the river Wupper 12 meters below with just minor injuries. She died in 1989 (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL Columbus never set foot in North America; he only explored the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America. (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL Myanmar over took Afghanistan in opium product in 2023 (www.france24.com)

TIL Cessna made a budget Fighter Jet using Cessna jet engines and other Cessna parts. (en.wikipedia.org)

The Scorpion is a tandem-seat twinjet aircraft with an all-composite material fuselage designed for light attack and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Production costs were minimized by using common commercial off the shelf technology, manufacturing resources and components developed for Cessna’s...

Hỏa Lò Prison was a notorious prison for POWs run by North Vietnam during the Vietnam war. It was known as the Hanoi Hilton. TIL there is literally a Hanoi Hilton. (www.hilton.com)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hỏa_Lò_Prison

TIL that in Japan, they have a thing called "nagashi somen", which are restaurants with flowing troughs of water where noodles slide down and you have to catch them (tokyocheapo.com)

TIL that in Sparta, after the wedding, brides would have their hair cut short and be dressed in men's clothing so that they would appear less threatening to their groom during the wedding night. (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL There is a subgenre of porn called Zombie Porn. (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL that whales went from ocean to the land and back to the ocean again. (www.cbc.ca)

TIL that Salvador Dali's famous painting "The Persistence of Memory" was only about the size of a sheet of office paper. (www.moma.org)

TIL that Ferrari & Lamborghini no longer make cars with a manual transmission (www.motortrend.com)

TIL that despite homosexual activity being punishable by death in the country, Iran allows gender reassignment surgery, and performs more of them than any country except Thailand. (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL at the Battle of Peleliu in the Pacific during WW2, of the 8 men awarded the Medal of Honor, 6 of them were for throwing themselves atop grenades to save nearby comrades (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL The United States was responsible for the majority of documented electoral interventions (en.m.wikipedia.org)

TIL that those oxygen masks that come down inside airplanes are connected to individual “chemical oxygen generators” rather than a supply of oxygen gas (en.wikipedia.org)

Originally coined as "invcel" around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student known as Alana, the spelling had shifted to "incel" by 1999 (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL a species of monkey known as the Lesula was discovered in 2007 (though already known by locals). It has a brilliantly blue bottom. (en.wikipedia.org)

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