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.

If I close one eye for a few minutes and then switch which eye is closed I see a very (very) subtle difference in hue.

Left eye sees a green tint; right eye sees a pink tint. It's more obvious when I'm looking at a white wall on a bright day.

I don't get this effect if I don't let one of my eyes adapt to the dark first.

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.

I mashed my keyboard and that Wikipedia article came up.

More links:

• https://www.asdf-format.org/projects/asdf-standard/en/1.1.1/
• https://github.com/asdf-format/asdf

The video describes it as “dancing,” which I think is overly generous. But the little guy / gal is clearly experiencing happiness and celebrating.

cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/4802929

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...

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/Bluest_waters on 2024-12-31 23:25:54+00:00.

Original Title: 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 dish. Once found out the owner refused to apologize.

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:

Desert

• desert Latin dēserō ("to abandon") << ultimately PIE **seh₁- ("to sow")
• Ancient Egyptian: Deshret (refers to the land not flooded by the Nile)  from dšr (red)

Shark

• shark Middle English shark from uncertain origin
• Chinese 鲨 (shā)  Named as its crude skin similar to sand (沙 (shā))

Kayak

• Inuktitut ᖃᔭᖅ (kayak) Proto-Eskimo *qyaq
• Turkish kayık ('small boat')[17] Old Turkic kayguk << Proto-Turkic kay- ("to slide, to turn")

A lot of these could be TIL posts of their own.

I also wonder if some of these are actually false cognates, or if there is a much earlier common origin with false associations that came afterwards

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."

The whale snot is a biological jackpot with DNA, microbiomes, and hormones. This data was nearly impossible to collect from a live whale. 

"I've seen more unique behaviors from a drone in the last five years than I've seen in the previous 25," Kerr said.

They’re apparently also using the drones to tag them for GPS tracking, really cool use for them.