TIL The term "joystick" does not originate from video games, and was first coined in 1909 (en.m.wikipedia.org)
The origin of the term is contested, but may be derived from “George Stick”, named for a possible inventor....
TIL May Day, not on the same day as US Labor Day, started "in commemoration of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago (1886)." (www.britannica.com)
In 1889 an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions designated May 1 as a day in support of workers, in commemoration of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago (1886). Five years later, U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland, uneasy with the socialist origins of Workers’ Day, signed legislation to make Labor Day—already...
TIL Lisztomania or Liszt fever was the intense fan frenzy directed toward Hungarian composer Franz Liszt during his performances in the 1800s. (aussie.zone)
From Wikipedia:...
TIL Taiwan and Australia have the same population, about 23.6 million
Australia is about 200 times bigger, by landmass, 7.7 million to Taiwan’s 36,000 square km
TIL personal credit scores only started in 1989 (en.m.wikipedia.org)
I always assumed credit scores were an integral and historic part of the American financial system....
TIL 2010 Vancouver luge gold medallist Felix Loch had his medal melted into two discs and gave one to the parents of a deceased competitor who died in a practice run on the day of the opening ceremony (www.si.com)
TIL that high speed electron beams are used for sterilization (www.youtube.com)
…and someone shielded the recording electronics of a 360° camera and shoved it through there....
TIL that the white stuff that sometimes appears on chocolate is called "chocolate bloom". (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL the Apollo 11 astronauts had to go through immigration in Hawaii when they splashed down because they had left U.S. borders. (lemmy.world)
I love that ‘moon’ is written under ‘place.’
TIL that platypuses glow under a UV light (www.nationalgeographic.co.uk)
Just when I think they cant be any more absurd, the little fuckers surprise me again. Here’s some more interesting facts about the platypus:...
TIL that a billionaire bought Lonely Planet and put an inexperienced 24 year old wedding photographer in charge (www.nbcnews.com)
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)
Colorado city of Loveland is hub of postal activity each Valentine’s Day (www.theguardian.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...
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....
