TIL BLACK SQUARE XVII is an artwork made from vitrified nuclear waste created by Taryn Simon. The piece will be put on display when deemed safe for human exposure in 3015. (aussie.zone)
👉 Garage Gallery...
TIL fairy dust was added to Peter Pan so that children wouldn't hurt themselves trying to fly when they got home from seeing the play. (en.m.wikipedia.org)
TIL that France and Spain are in the wrong time zone because of Nazis.
France was put on to German time when conquered by Nazi Germany....
TIL The term keystone species refers to species that define an entire ecosystem, where it would be dramatically different or cease to exist without the species. Examples: beavers, wolves, and sea otte (education.nationalgeographic.org)
A keystone species is an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem. Without its keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether....
TIL of GUERRILLA MARKETING and the GREAT MOONINITE PANIC of 2007 : or How a tiny LED sign turned a city upside down. (aussie.zone)
👉 Boston.com article...
TIL There was a monument in Georgia that gives instructions in 8 languages on how to rebuild society after an apocalyptic event, while also functioning as a compass, calendar, and clock.
TIL about Moonbow: Nature's Rare and Beautiful Phenomenon Similar to Rainbow (upload.wikimedia.org)
A moonbow is a rare and stunning natural phenomenon that occurs when moonlight is refracted and reflected off water droplets in the air, creating a colorful arc of light in the night sky. Similar to a rainbow, moonbows are formed when light is dispersed into its various colors, but they are much rarer and more elusive, as they...
TIL The name "flashlight" came from the first lights that could only briefly illuminate because the batteries couldn’t hold a charge for long periods of time (blog.bulbhead.com)
David Misell, an English inventor, invented the first flashlight and patented it in 1899. It used three D batteries in a tube that was used as the handle of the device. The batteries supplied enough power to create light through an incandescent bulb....
TIL researchers recorded the brain waves of a dying person, they showed patterns similar to those occurring during memory recall. (blog.frontiersin.org)
Neuroscientists have recorded the activity of a dying human brain and discovered rhythmic brain wave patterns around the time of death that are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation. Now, a study published to Frontiers brings new insight into a possible organizational role of the brain during...
TIL - Bulgaria , over the past 35 years, has seen the fastest decline in population of any country in the world — a 28 percent drop (e360.yale.edu)
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)
TIL of Max Headroom. A faux computer generated show host that went viral in the 80's. (youtu.be)
TIL The Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Here is the Wikipedia link.
TIL about Hector the Convector a thunderstorm and cloud system that forms nearly every afternoon from September to March in the Northern Territory of Australia (en.wikipedia.org)
Named by pilots during the Second World War, the recurring position of the thunderstorm made it a navigational beacon for pilots and mariners in the region. A mesoscale phenomenon, Hector is caused primarily by a collision of several sea breeze boundaries across the Tiwi Islands and is known for its consistency and intensity....
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 about a flower which is called “naked man orchid”. (feddit.de)
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)
TIL The first recorded human death by robot was in 1979 when 25-year-old Ford Motor assembly line worker Robert William was struck by an arm of a malfunctioning one-ton robot (www.wikiwand.com)
Williams was one of three operators of the parts retrieval system, a five-story robot built by the Unit Handling Systems division of Litton Industries. The robot was designed to retrieve castings from high density storage shelves at the Flat Rock plant. Part of the machine included one-ton transfer vehicles, which were carts on...
TIL some species of ants farm aphids like we do cows (www.mcgill.ca)
Link: www.westcoastseeds.com/…/do-ants-farm-aphids....
TIL fermilab had a ferret to find obstructions in their particle accelerator in the 1960s (news.fnal.gov)
TIL Legionnaires' disease (form of walking pneumonia) got its name from an outbreak at an American Legion convention (99percentinvisible.org)
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 during the early days of the internet, companies tried to prohibit linking to some of their sites. The linked site linked to all of them during half of 2002 (web.archive.org)
In one of the even more absurd cases: According to an AP report (cited in Slashdot), Intentia International has filed criminal charges against Reuters PLC, alleging that the news service illegally obtained an earnings report that the company had not yet released, by guessing the URL at which it had been posted on Intentia's...
TIL: The CDC estimates that 5 percent of all hospital admissions result in a healthcare-associated infection, culminating in approximately 722,000 infections and 75,000 deaths each year (epi.dph.ncdhhs.gov)
TIL the WORLDS UGLIEST COLOUR has a name : PANTONE 448c (aussie.zone)
👉wiki...
