TIL about "Patch Hop" dances, when young women in the '40s and '50s would claim a boy for a school dance by sewing their patch onto their clothes (lemmy.world)
TIL that a billionaire bought Lonely Planet and put an inexperienced 24 year old wedding photographer in charge (www.nbcnews.com)
TIL about the gameboy accessory that gasses kids to sleep for surgery (www.destructoid.com)
A new piece of medical equipment is being tested right now called the Pedisedate. Basically, it is a headset that is placed on a child before they are admitted to surgery. The device connects to a Game Boy or portable CD player (yup, not a Nintendo DS or iPod — apparently the Pedisedate also transports you to 1996) and a...
Colorado city of Loveland is hub of postal activity each Valentine’s Day (www.theguardian.com)
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 about the phrase 'carbon footprint'
It was initially used by BP to shift blame to consumers instead of oil companies.
TiL the car and gas industry knew about the health risks of leaded fuel but sold it for 100 years anyway
link :...
TIL Germany sometimes used VW Beetles as police cars (www.caranddriver.com)
TIL that there are two words in the English language that rhyme with 'purple'
I always believed that there were none, but on a rewatch of QI, I learned there are actually two:...
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 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 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 you can make soda from pine needles (www.growforagecookferment.com) French
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 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 About How 11 Lines of Code Supported Web Development and the Code Was Deleted It Broke the Internet (getpocket.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 SearXNG -- search like the old days where you get relevant results instead of a page half full of weird nonsense (searx.envs.net)
TIL Cass Elliot died in Harry Nilsson's apartment, and four years later Keith Moon died in the same room (en.wikipedia.org)
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 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)
