TIL in Australia the name of the band "AC/DC" is pronounced "Acca Dacca" (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL - Pandanus tectorius, also known as Hala fruit, has segmented, large fruits with a diameter of 4–20 cm and a length of 8–30 cm. The fruits are made up of 38–200 wedge-like keys (phalanges) (midi.moe)
TIL the only guy in ZZ Top without a giant beard is named Frank Beard. (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL that the Mormons have one fund worth over $100 billion (www.sltrib.com)
They are required to talk about anything over $100 million but they “didn’t want people to be discouraged about tithing to them.”...
TIL "several nations recognize the right of prisoners to attempt to escape prison or jail, including Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Mexico due to what is seen as basic human nature..." (www.grunge.com)
Source: grunge.com/…/why-it-is-legal-to-attempt-to-escape…...
TIL Kowloon Walled City existed and is the real world origin for many visual representations of oppressive urbanization in cyberpunk media (en.wikipedia.org)
I came across a video on Youtube discussing it (there are several), and Kowloon Walled City is just endlessly fascinating. A few notable videos I found on the subject were:...
TIL about “passive houses,” building that are airtight and require barely any energy to heat or cool (en.m.wikipedia.org)
More info here: wsj.com/…/passive-home-design-massachusetts-2c89a…
TIL the military cannot enlist a recruit with an IQ measured lower than 80 and is required to keep enlisted individuals with an IQ of 81-92 to less than 20% of the armed forces in active duty. (www.law.cornell.edu)
(a)The number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in any armed force during any fiscal year whose score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the tenth percentile and below the thirty-first percentile may not exceed 20 percent of the total...
TIL Peter Molyneux failed his first game so badly he started a baked bean export company, which got confused with a software firm and kickstarted his development career (en.wikipedia.org)
After his first game venture failed, Peter Molyneux started a baked bean export business. Commodore International mistakenly offered him ten free Amiga systems because they confused the baked bean company’s name “Taurus” with a software company “Torus”, and he used the hardware to create a database system for the...
TIL Bob Barker was an enrolled member of the Sioux Tribe and grew up on a reservation in South Dakota (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL that in the US, liberal adolescents are much more likely to experience depression than their conservative counterparts. This divergence in depression rates only started recently and is growing (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
TIL of RHYTHM 0 : A performance art piece in which Marina Abramović stood still for six hours while the audience could do whatever they wanted to her. (aussie.zone)
👉wiki...
TIL of BILLBOARD LIBERATION FRONT : An artist guerrilla group that alters billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti-corporate message. (aussie.zone)
👉A beginners guide to brandalism...
TIL about this tool, the *Reinigungsschaber* ! (lemmy.world)
I had lost hope with my electric cooking plates. The white circles where completely hidden under a layer of diamond-grade burn residue that no amount of scrubbing with chemicals could even begin to remove. I found this 3€ scrapping tool and it’s amazing !!! Sorry, but I don’t have the before picture, believe me after 6...
TIL: "Don't mess with Texas" started as an anti litter slogan (www.youtube.com)
Seems wild that a now beloved phrase, started as a government slogan to get people to stop throwing trash on the road.
TIL Spiders might dream. New study finds evidence of REM-like movement in arachnids (boingboing.net)
TIL that player behaviors to a software bug that created a pandemic in World of Warcraft had similarities to COVID-19 in the real world (en.wikipedia.org)
… researchers noted the similarities between the game and the real-world pandemics. Both had an immediate impact on dense urban areas, which limited the effectiveness of containment procedures in stopping the spread of disease, while air travel, like fast travel, allowed infections to spread across large parts of the world...
TIL about Eugene Debs, a 1920 Socialist candidate who ran for President while jailed in Federal prison for sedition, receiving 3.4% of the vote at the time. He promised to pardon himself if elected. (en.wikipedia.org)
Eugene Debs, a Socialist leader in the early 20th century, ran for President five times. His fifth and highest vote count came in the 1920 Presidential election, in which he was running while in Federal prison for sedition. He received about 3.4% of the vote at the time (which included women for the first time since the...
TIL about Wirtz pumps. Put a hose in a vertical spiral and spin it in a body of water and it'll pump water through the hose with way more pressure than you would think. (www.youtube.com)
TIL The first air conditioner was created not for cooling a room but to prevent humidity causing swelling pages and blurry prints in a printing press (www.smithsonianmag.com)
At the turn of the 20th century, humidity threatened the reputation of Brooklyn’s Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographic and Publishing Company’s high-quality color printing. After two summers of extreme heat disrupted business and caused swelling pages and blurry prints, the printing company found that a nascent cooling industry...
TIL that the worst stadium disaster in history was the collapse of a wooden amphitheater in 27 AD that killed 20,000 people. (en.m.wikipedia.org)
Just came across a mention of this in the toldinstone video How Dangerous Was the Front Row of the Colosseum?.
TIL: A simple rubber glove will get pet hair out of fabrics (lemmy.world)
This works way better than you might expect.
TIL ants that farm aphids influence the aphids’ genes in a similar way that we do with cows. Aphid-farming ants prefer and select for red/green polymorphism. (www.nature.com)
From the article:...
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
TIL Soviet cosmonauts carried a shotgun on space missions (en.wikipedia.org)
It was purportedly (and probably in actuality) intended as a survival aid to be used after landings and before recovery in the Siberian wilderness, although allegedly was intended as a defensive weapon against in-space attacks by the US space program.
