Today I Learned (TIL)

TIL A restaurant in Long Beach, CA, was found to be serving Popeye's chicken and passing it off as their own. They would buy the chicken at Popeyes and upcharge for their own chicken and waffles d...

Fully rolled Lemmy themes you can add to the Stylus browser extension are out there! E.g. https://github.com/hanubeki/hanubeki-lemmy-themes

There is a table of examples in the link. Some I saw include:

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4199810

Ocean Alliance began working with drones in 2013. Within the last few years, they began collecting exhaled breath condensation, also known as "whale snot."

example from wikipedia:

A friend was talking to a young butcher telling him about how this crazy guy comes to the supermarket to BUY rotten meat! Butcher kid can't think of WTF anybody would to do with rotten meat. My friend tells him it's probably to make dog food.

The linked article includes animations for each of the different cases

Gutzon Borglum was the sculptor and was involved with the KKK. He was chosen because he was the sculptor of the "Shrine to the Confederacy” which was the inspiration for Mount Rushmore.

Source

Federal prosecutors once regarded Jesse Curtis Morton as a threat to national security.

Blanter accompanied the Red Army to Berlin in early 1945. He was commissioned by Stalin to compose a symphony about the capture of Berlin. However, when Vasily Chuikov was meeting with a German delegation led by Hans Krebs to negotiate their surrender following Hitler's suicide, Chuikov had several uniformed war correspondents pretend to be members of his general staff in order to appear more professional and intimidating at the negotiations. But Blanter was also meeting with Chuikov at the time the delegation arrived and he could not pass as a Red Army officer as he was wearing civilian clothes. Thus, Chuikov shoved him into a closet just before the delegate entered the room. While he remained there for most of the conference, he eventually lapsed into unconsciousness from a lack of air, collapsing out of the closet and into the room just as the delegates were preparing to leave, embarrassing Chuikov and astonishing the Germans.

TIL Seoul 1988 was the first Olympics to have condoms distributed, with a supply of 8500 with increases ever since. However there is no research evidence that athletes competing in the Olympics would be more likely to seek out casual sex

TIL 18th Century Norwegian swashbuckler Peter Tordenskjold once ran out of ammo during a sea battle so he sent his enemy a letter thanking him for "a fine duel" and asking him to send more ammo so they could carry on. The two crews then toasted each other's health and went their separate ways.

B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Archive is background info via this BBC post from 2023, but that's just one piece. Yeah, a lot of us have seen the photo, and maybe some of us know it was during the Viet Nam War, during Civil Rights protests in the U.S. and not that long after the assassination of MLK. Maybe you even know that Muhammad Ali lost his belt and was banned from boxing in the U.S. for refusing the draft to Viet Nam:

So that,'s a bummer.

Caddisfly larvae live in streams and other fresh water sources, housing themselves in tubes they have created from items in their natural environment. Using sand, pieces of shell, etc., the caddisfly, a close relative of the butterfly, uses silk to connect and upholster their protective tubes. A naturalist at heart, Mr. Duprat experimented with the larvae, placing them in a home aqaurium with pieces of gold, gold rods, semi-precious, and precious stones. They immediately went to work, creating this:

Boops boops (/ˈboʊ.ɒps ˈboʊ.ɒps/; from Ancient Greek βόωψ, literally 'ox-eyed'), commonly called the bogue, is a species of seabream native to the eastern Atlantic

The fastest human on the planet might be a quadrupedal runner at the 2048 Olympics, which may be achieved by shifting up to the rotary gallop and taking longer strides with wide sagittal trunk motion. More generally, investigation of quadrupedal running will not only result in the development of new techniques that allow biomechanists to study locomotion in natural settings but will also reveal the underlying principles of how these runners accomplish their astonishing performances.

As an extra TIL, he has grandchildren!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephantine_Colossus

Press release on the scientific discovery: https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/mystery-four-horned-goats-and-sheep-finally-solved

The notes Fiat sent out were part of a marketing campaign to introduce the Cinquecento to Spanish consumers — the plan was to prime demand with the request “for a couple of minutes [together]” and then, four to six days later, follow up with a letter explaining that the note was from the car company with an invitation for a test drive.

The article is short so I recommend reading it. I started adding the key points below, but ended up including almost the entire article:

The study is available for free here, via. cambridge.org:

In typography, rivers (or rivers of white) are gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. Rivers can occur regardless of the spacing settings, but are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts. Rivers are less noticeable with proportional fonts, due to narrow spacing. Another cause of rivers is the close repetition of a long word or similar words at regular intervals, such as "maximization" with "minimization" or "optimization".

As Cary Mitchell, a horticulturist at Purdue University told NPR, in the 1990s, “research showed that you could grow lettuce in just red light. If you add a little bit of blue, it grows better.”

The symptoms normally disappear after several days and there are no adverse health effects.

Menendez, who serves as a Democrat senator for the state of New Jersey, faces a slew of criminal charges including bribery and conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.****

Resort towns face an exaggerated version of this crisis. Havens beset by the 1 percent—like Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Vail and Aspen, Colorado; and Nantucket, Provincetown, and the Vineyard in Massachusetts—have seen working- and middle-class housing disappear. Seasonal rental properties, including Airbnbs, often cannibalize the market. In one extreme case, Boston-area investor David Malm has spent nearly $100 million since 2021 buying up properties on the Vineyard and Nantucket, including a house in Edgartown that he rents for $45,000 per week.

She only stopped to give kisses to a woman who was having a panic attack.

Peckham Rock, essentially a lump of concrete showing a supposed prehistoric figure pushing a shopping trolley, was smuggled into the venue in 2005. It stayed for three days before staff realised it didn't belong there.

Source: https://www.kirinholdings.com/en/newsroom/release/2022/1223_01.html

TIL The first man to finish the 1904 Olympic marathon rode in a car half the race. The actual winner had to be carried across the finish line after his coaches gave him a mix of brandy, eggs and strychnine. 4th place stole 2 peaches from a spectator, ate rotten apples from an orchard and took a nap.

(Full disclosure, I learned this yesterday.)

This letter was written to the Editors of the New York Times Dec. 2, 1948 -- only months after the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.

While this is noted as more legend than history, I still think it's pretty interesting.

Women's suffrage would not be introduced in Liechtenstein until 1984.

Bonus: Nowadays Australian doctors staying over the winter must remove their appendix preemptively, in order to avoid similar situations.

Bonus: The Britons were reluctant to the new American invention for a long time. In the early 1960s tea bags only made up 3% of the market, but in 2007 it had risen to 96%.

List of tallest building on Wikipedia.

I was playing with it and it is so interesting to use software from the past.