Commented - til - Kbin.cafe

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: "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 that the only part of the UK that officially speaks English is Northern Ireland. (populationdata.org.uk)

Surprisingly, there is no law declaring English the official language of the UK....

TIL Why giraffes have patches (pursuit.unimelb.edu.au)

TIL that The Smallest Computer in the World Fits On a Grain of Rice (ece.engin.umich.edu)

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 rabies is an STD (www.ebervet.com)

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: Most glass used today is float glass (en.m.wikipedia.org)

Liquid glass is poured over a bath of liquid tin where it floats on top, gradually cooling until it can be lifted off, annealed to prevent cracking, cut and packaged....

TIL about the scientist who stuck his head in an active particle accelerator and the scientist who accidentally gave himself the wrong STD (youtu.be)

Worst Science Experiments Gone Wrong...

TIL in 2013, an Italian mafia "Ndrangheta" made more money than McDonald's and Deutsche Bank combined (€53bn / £44bn) (www.theguardian.com)

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 - about Louis Wain and his portrayals of cats. Before Wain, cats in England were often thought of with contempt, but his work helped to show them as something to be liked, admired and even loved (illustrationchronicles.com)

TIL about a collection of math problems, known as “The Millennium Problems” that will earn the solver a $1 million prize (www.claymath.org)

A collection of mysterious and unsolved math problems, also known as “The Millennium Problems” are 7 extremely challenging and complex mathematical problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Solving any of these problems would not only advance our understanding of mathematics but also earn the solver a...

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 You can see all of the Lemmy community comments and posts that have been removed at the bottom of the sidebar.

It’s called Modlog in the Monitoring Stats section....

TIL how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders (www.theguardian.com)

Stop wasting your time and $ on mobile game. Get real game. Console, PC master race, …

TIL: In the song DARE it's "you've got to press it on you" rather than "you've got depression on you" (genius.com)

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

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 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 that shocking gum was used as a torture device in Iraqi prison. (en.wikipedia.org)

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 fermilab had a ferret to find obstructions in their particle accelerator in the 1960s (news.fnal.gov)

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....