Today I Learned

The domestic pigeon (Columba livia domestica) is a pigeon subspecies that's derived from the rock dove or rock pigeon. The rock pigeon is the world's oldest domesticated bird. Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets mention the domestication of pigeons more than 5,000 years ago, as do Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Wild rock doves are uniformly pale grey with two black bars on each wing, with few differences being seen between males and females; i.e. they are not strongly sexually dimorphic. The domestic pigeon (Columba livia domestica, which includes about 1,000 different breeds) descended from this species. Escaped domestic pigeons are the origin of feral pigeons around the world. Both forms can vary widely in the colour and pattern of their plumage unlike their wild ancestor, being red, brown, checkered, uniformly colored, or piebald.

The genus name Columba is the Latin word meaning "pigeon, dove", whose older etymology comes from the Ancient Greek κόλυμβος (kólumbos), "a diver", hence κολυμβάω (kolumbáō), "dive, plunge headlong, swim". Aristophanes and others use the word κολυμβίς (kolumbís), "diver", for the name of the bird, because of its swimming motion in the air. The specific epithet livia is a Medieval Latin variant of livida, "livid, bluish-grey"; this was Theodorus Gaza's translation of Greek péleia, "dove", itself thought to be derived from pellós, "dark-coloured".

Before the Columbian Exchange, rock doves were restricted to a natural resident range in western and southern Europe, North Africa, and extending into South Asia. They were carried into the New World aboard European ships between 1603 and 1607.

Fun fact, there is no clear distinction between pigeons and doves. Generally, bigger species get labeled "pigeons" while more delicate ones are named "doves".

If there’s anything we’ve learned from the coronavirus pandemic, it’s that washing our hands is one of the best ways to protect ourselves from the dangers of contagion. But hand washing does much more than cleanse us physically; sometimes it can wipe our mental slate clean. Here are some examples of what a bit of soap can do for our psyches.

It is were the term gas lighting comes from

Also, here are some other fun facts about him:

He was 5'7

He may have had heterochromia (one eye was blue the other was brown.)

He smelled GREAT apparently.

Our short king apparently had a deep voice lol.

He would sometimes jump off a moving chariot and run alongside it it race it, as he enjoyed running/sprinting.

During his campaign he and his boyfr- I mean his best friend visited the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus, with them placing garlands on their statues. Alexander crowned Achilles' statue and Hephaestion crowned Patroclus's. Afterward, they anointed themselves with oil and ran around the statues naked.

When his favorite war horse, Bucephalus, a war horse he'd tamed and had since his early teens died he named a city after him. He would also do the same thing for his dog Peritas.

He would sleep with an annotated copy of the lliad, given to him by his tutor Aristotle, under his pillow as well as with a dagger.

When his beloved Hephaestion died of an unknown illness (but seemingly brought on by excessive drinking) it plunged Alexander into despair. He laid over the body and stayed there weeping all day and night, refusing food or drink, and eventually had to be dragged away by his men.

In the following days he either lay in bed in silence or lay there softly weeping. He shaved his head, to them a sign of mourning, and ordered that the fire meant to signify the death of the king if extinguished (i.e himself) be extinguished. He then ordered that the temple built for the Greek god of healing be destroyed.

He also created a whole ass cult for Hephaestion, complete with followers, shrines, altars, artwork and offerings.

He died at age thirty two, after having conquered most of the known world.

A massive crater on the dark side of the moon apparently has two 2.6km deep canyons leading off. A massive rock hit the moon at 1-2 kilometers per second, creating the huge crater. Extra debris blown off caused the canyons.

"Guardian super-blogger flames Reg boffinry desk" "the observed variations in the solar spectrum have caused roughly as much warming of Earth's surface as have increases in carbon dioxide emissions, says Haigh." Open and shut, then. Much of recent global warming [...] was actually down to changes in the Sun.

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It seems that the Republic of China also control a few islands in the Fuchien/Fujian province as well, which are quite close to the People's Republic of China

I remember the guy started working on military defense but i didn't know he founded his own military defense company named after the lord of the rings with the help of peter thiel. Also i wasn't aware his company is now producing an arsenal of surveillance weapons and leading the sector.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries

Swardspeak (also known as salitang bakla (lit. 'gay speak') or "gay lingo") is an argot or cant slang derived from Taglish (Tagalog-English code-switching) and used by a number of LGBT people in the Philippines.

cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5408672

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/TirelessGuardian on 2025-03-15 12:41:13+00:00.

Original Title: TIL In 1983, it was announced on radio that the hard to find Cabbage Patch Dolls would be dropped from a plane at County Stadium. People just needed to hold up a catcher’s mitt and their credit card, to be photographed by the plane. 20-30 people fell for the prank and showed up at the stadium.

Apart from already looking cursed, canning bananas at home comes with an almost certain risk of botulism.

https://www.foodrepublic.com/1672144/canned-bananas-explained/

The first two are:

1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke, the famed sci-fi author who penned these laws, is probably best known for co-authoring the screenplay to 2001: A Space Odyssee

cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5402137

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/SteO153 on 2025-03-14 08:35:14+00:00.

He is in a documentary called The Encampments (2025)

https://nitter.net/OnlinePalEng/status/1900437294055649789

This appears counterintuitive; people typically predict intense states to last longer. The hypothesized for this disconnect is that, intense states trigger psychological defense processes that reduce the distress, while less intense states do not trigger the same psychological defense processes and, therefore, less effective attenuation of the stress occurs.

The singular of data in Latin is datum, but in English it's data. It is a mass noun where it's not easy to break it into individual, countable pieces. Something like sand is almost never represented in ite plural form of sands.

Typically includes rice fried with ketchup, sausages, sunny-side up eggs, a drumstick and some veggies.

I would actually like to try this!

Silbo gomero is a whistled register of Spanish that is used to communicate across the deep ravines and narrow valleys that radiate through the island and is generally used for public communication such as event invitations or PSAs. A speaker of Silbo Gomero is sometimes called a silbador ("whistler").

Silbo Gomero is a transposition of Spanish from speech to whistling. The oral phoneme-whistled phoneme substitution emulates Spanish phonology through a reduced set of whistled phonemes. In 2009, UNESCO declared it a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5379739

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/Dull_View_5897 on 2025-03-12 00:49:39+00:00.

Original Title: TIL that Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, left Facebook in 2017 over a dispute on WhatsApp monetization and claims he was coached to mislead EU regulators about data merging. In 2018, he supported #DeleteFacebook, saying it was the right time as pressure mounted on the company.