TIL that Anthony Blinken, current US Secretary of State, has over 650 monthly listeners on Spotify.
open.spotify.com/artist/5ZWgy4Riyzr0QtvcIKiZmF
TIL the US is the only rich country offering no national paid parental leave (www.bbc.com)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/82/af/82af1a13657617697aa7c0e55f5a5fc9c8a94113544ccacd8a7dba25ff03b7ce.jpg)
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 That Britain Is Poorer Than Any US State, Even Mississippi (www.forbes.com)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/2f/2c/2f2c3fce3cac961de1173bafb2ef968423f0bb2bfd6e60710a664897e788c80e.png)
TIL that the album "Songs for the Deaf" by Queens of the Stone Age has a hidden track before Track #1 (en.m.wikipedia.org)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/b1/62/b162bb9640f5cd77e4b210a755c78f7ad2cbad3c427623a53605ba8d7a2f3e69.png)
TIL yawning is observed in almost all vertebrate animals and is "contagious" across species. There is no consensus on why yawning occurs. (en.wikipedia.org)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/65/ac/65acd4aad5d6d8e9ec5779d0ef522346af1561ac3664558f6992549785e8eb0b.jpg)
TIL about the 1957 Kyshtym disaster in the USSR, where improperly stored nuclear waste exploded and created the third-worst peacetime nuclear incident in history. It was kept secret until 1976. (en.wikipedia.org)
To make it worse, before they decided to store the nuclear waste, they’d just dump it into the river, which was used as drinking water by thousands of people. Again, kept secret.
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/76/09/760989784f2be3139d9d91e27408b7ca3bf53c0ad28387ef985d514f33b09511.png)
TIL in Portugal you can get an unlimited national rail pass for €49 🚂
euronews.com/…/want-to-travel-portugal-by-train-n…
TIL the german chancellor takes screenshots of his tweets on X and publishes it on his website because X is now a closed system. (feddit.de)
www.bundeskanzler.de/…/twitter-bundeskanzler
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/94/93/9493e676ac0daaf19c529ad20b64ad12005729342afea268f2b0d5217f5513ca.jpg)
TIL just 20% of European homes have air conditioning compared to 88% in US (www.nbcnews.com)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/62/ef/62efcd9e06bc58d6001dcafae716ecc10fd0e0084329dd770b3b0236c41d9f08.jpg)
TIL that In World War II, British spies plotted to spike Hitler's food with estrogen to make him less aggressive.
TIL there was a third founder of Apple. He sold his 10% of the company for $800 worried that his assets could be seized by creditors if the company failed (www.cnbc.com)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/a5/2b/a52b0b66ade843554bda7b175f5feb248dcaee90227b26b99c39ea391fec2ec7.jpg)
til: Benford's law: real life number are not evenly disribued, 1 occur 30% of the time (lemmy.world)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/0c/40/0c4070ce8f40bc602c91d92c0295eb97e7df6dd5d2c680b8ad921975711aebc1.png)
TIL "The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That’s the middle ground." (caitlinjohnstone.com)
The mainstream position in the west is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that Moscow is 100% responsible for this conflict in every way while the US is just an innocent little flower who just wants to protect freedom and democracy. When you actually spell out what the mainstream position...
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/f4/4a/f44a170a700a537e8a80bc940be3037f971cecf4e02ed77c0b2406f1e99ab103.jpg)
TIL the Monkees had an FBI File (faroutmagazine.co.uk)
Can’t get more subversive than The Monkees.
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/32/27/32272519aea898b2c08a325494382f1152ccb7582b9f3789b3e0079dc6daf219.jpg)
TIL that "1 Week of Water Fasting" is very easy for me (tube.jeena.net)
In the video I do a summary of how it went.
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/c7/05/c7056fb40411ed3bd773afd4320740d4657c9b1d909c8a0f3ff8132e360239ad.jpg)
TIL Black Panthers are not a real species. They are jaguars and leopards who have “Melanism”, which causes them to have black skin. It's the opposite effect of having albinism.
TIL CJK compatibilty ideographs (often used to put a lot of symbols in fonts such as 着 which displays as the Wii logo on my machine) were originally allocated to support older standards for storing Chinese characters and derivatives in code points (en.wikipedia.org)
Sorry for the confusing title. Basically before Unicode, a bunch of different standards for storing Chinese characters (also used in Korean and Japanese which also have some of their own derivatives) emerged. When Unicode sought to unify every standard they of course had to add compatibility for older standards so for all the...
TIL that Mississippi did not make child-selling illegal until 2009, after a woman tried to sell her granddaughter for $2,000 and a car and it was discovered that there was no law to punish her under.
TIL that 1604, King James I wrote ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, in which he described smoking as a ‘custome lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.
TIL digital sweatshops are a thing, one of them is owned by Amazon (m.youtube.com)
Yanis brings speaks about the topic at hand within the first 5 min. of video...
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/d2/7c/d27c164138f4a1d42a64e1fb9dabb6d5a17535cdf2e2dd06b5f272ce3d25a5ce.jpg)
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...
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/a2/e0/a2e0e3b2c48b0360de1f6a356bdc01f2a1c5562b2c0de79f3bcf60b763998907.jpg)
TIL South Carolina grows more than twice as many peaches than Georgia (www.statista.com)
![](https://kbin.life/media/cache/resolve/entry_thumb/af/06/af06ed5a3b183189c00361c00ec82130e60dc945b84314107a1387eeaa505d9f.png)
TIL camels have teeth you'd expect from a carnivore (abload.de)
Sources:...