Today I Learned (TIL)

The theorem has been expressed colloquially as "you can't comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick" or "you can't comb the hair on a coconut".

The fourth floor is labeled 3A. The 14th floor is labeled 13A, etc. Four is considered bad luck.

The sport, practised in Italy, used a wheel of maiorchino cheese and a course with a target at the end.

Psychologist B. F. Skinner create a "baby in a box" crib that was designed to make the mother's role easier. It would probably have prevented a lot of SIDS death, but because of its association with Skinner, it never caught on.

Construction began in 2022. It plans to launch satellites.

Drop the pasta, start the playlist, when the music is over, you’ve got perfectly cooked pasta

Between 1915 and 1926, Encephalitis Lethargica, or sleeping sickness, swept the world. It left people frozen—awake but unable to move or speak. Half a million died or became trapped in their bodies. Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, it vanished without explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6NnKHzHC1s

I mashed my keyboard and that Wikipedia article came up.

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!