til

TIL - Laboratory experiments show that bacteria really do eat and digest plastic (www.sciencedaily.com)

TIL rabies is an STD (www.ebervet.com)

TIL that dragonflies live 80% of their life underwater as larvae. (byjus.com)

The Larva: It is interesting to note that even though we’ve seen dragonflies mostly flying around us during hot summer months, they spend most of their life underwater as a larva. They can live underwater for as long as two years, and this is considered to be the longest stage in the life cycle of a dragonfly....

TIL of Mustatils; over 1000 walled courtyards spanning hundreds of meters were built at least 7000 years ago. Their function in unknown. (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL of Naba Baongo II, a sub-national monarch in Burkina Faso. In 2015, he played a key role in ending a military coup in the country peacefully, without any bloodshed. His kingdom is 528+ years old (en.wikipedia.org)

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 that I saved a 13 year old post from the old place that lists all the free web learning courses. He updated it for quite a while. Why don't we fix it?

General Sites:...

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 many of the social media sites top brass come directly from the alphabet orgs (twitter.com)

CIA, NSA, FBI,…...

TIL Wikipedia is an arm of the propaganda machine for politicians and gov't agencies (web.archive.org)

You can read more about Larry’s encyclosphere here: larrysanger.org/…/the-encyclosphere-is-greater-th…

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 most living generations at once was 7, back in 1989. They each had their child between 18 to 20yrs of age

I was trying to figure out how many generations could theoretically exist at the same time, so I decided to first check Guinness. Hopefully I did all the math correctly.

TIL that retired chemist, Khonghao Shou, predicted the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran by observing cloud formations.

He not only predicted the approximate date, but also the magnitude and epicenter....

TIL there is a theory that Columbus' Navigator, William Harris AKA Guillermo Herries, an Irishman from Galway, had actually sailed to the Americas before 1492. (youtu.be)

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 that Judy Garland was the mother of Liza Minelli 😱 (it.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 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 Abou thief ants that infest any nests to steal food (www.canr.msu.edu)

Thief ants are absolutely tiny ants that are named for building their nests connected to the colonies of bigger ant species. They do this to steal food.

TIL Tupac Shakur was considered for the role of Mace Windu in the Prequel Star Wars trilogy. (en.wikipedia.org)

From the Wiki: According to former Death Row Records chief engineer Rick Clifford, George Lucas was eyeing Tupac to star in his return to the “Star Wars” saga. Lucas had asked Jackson to ask Shakur to audition but due to Shakur’s untimely death the role ultimately went to Samuel L. Jackson. The character’s bald...

TIL in the 17th century, the San people in Southern Africa created rock art depicting colonial ships and colonists following first contact (africanrockart.britishmuseum.org)

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