Today I Learned
- TIL who the Druze are
Druze people are an ethnic religion, like Judaism. The Druze faith is Abrahamic and monotheistic, dating back about 1000 years. It was initially an offshoot of an offshoot of Islam, but its members are not Muslims. They believe in many prophets, and in reincarnation leading to being united with the Cosmic Mind. They have influences from Christianity. You can't convert, you can only be born into it. There's about a million Druze people in the Middle East, including in Israel. They apparently do well in Israeli society. They are educated. They serve in the military.
Druze in Syria are not doing well, though. They are under attack right now, where things are just generally kind of shit. The Syrian government is trying to hold things together, but Syrian government forces are killing people and attacking religious minorities, including the Druze. The Druze, for their part, refuse to give up their weapons and want to maintain territory for themselves.
- TIL Supremes Opinions
tw: politics
Today I learned that, since April, the Supreme Court of the United States has sided with Trump in all 15 rulings it has issued on the President’s emergency requests. Of those 15 rulings, the court has only written 3 majority opinions. 7 have come with no explanation at all.
I don't have to convince anyone here of what's going on in America, obvs. I just wanted to share because this fact surprised me. I didn't realize that they weren't even justifying their decisions, which normally they do.
- TIL sweat comes out of the pores, which does this when you shave
for background, I shaved my forearms for practicing methods of shaving my legs. low-key a mistake, don't think id recommend shaving arms lol
I picked up a pizza after getting a shower and to dry out my hair faster I didn't turn on the AC, was in a hot car in Florida for like 5m while it cooked and this is what happened. Pretty cool!
Edit: also it's interesting to visualize how much water is lost when you sweat
- TIL there's a ferris wheel sauna in Finlandskywheel.fi Experiences - SkyWheel
We offer unforgettable experiences that combine stunning views, comfort, luxury, and uniqueness. Explore our special services that will make your visit to our
- TIL of the Narcissist Smirk.wasitme.blog The Narcissist Smirk.
Not every smirk comes from a toxic person, but most toxic people smirk. The narcissist’s smirk, also known as “duper’s delight,” is a subtle but telling expression that occu…
Paraphrased:
The narcissist’s smirk is a subtle but telling expression that occurs when a narcissist experiences pleasure from manipulating or deceiving someone.
For narcissists, the smirk usually reflects contempt, which is a deep-seated disdain or lack of respect towards others. For narcissists contempt is tied to their belief in their own superiority. They view others who do not serve their needs as worthless or beneath them, showing a complete disregard for how their actions impact those around them.
- TIL the QWERTY keyboard was *not* designed to intentionally slow down typing
For a long time, I believed the story that they QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down typing, because typing too fast would cause jams on old typewriters, but apparently it isn't true.
Skip to 3:00 for the part that talks about this.
- www.bbc.com When an unsung Indian helped Austrian Jews escape the Nazis
Kundanlal risked all to rescue Jewish families during Europe's darkest hour and bring them to India.
- TIL about Alexandra David-Neel, first european woman to enter Lhasa
David-Neel already had a passion for travel in her youth. She travelled through many european countries and wrote travel guide books. She was also active in anarchist and feminist circles all over Europe. At 21 she converted to buddhism and later travelled to India, where among other things she learned Sanskrit. From the ages 27 to 36 she worked as an opera singer and writer.
In 1911, at the age of 42, she set off on her longest journey to India and Tibet. She met the 13th Dalai Lamai in India and became fluent in Tibetan. The next years were spent in a buddhist monastery in India studying with several buddhist teachers. In 1916 she began her Journey to Tibet, entering which was at the time forbidden for foreigners. Still she managed to study buddhist scripts at the tempels and had an audience with the Panchen Lama. Upon her return to India the british authorities informed her that she was to be deported for violating the ban. Instead of going back to France, she travelled on to Japan, where she again spent time meeting with and learning from buddhist philosophers.
In 1924 she again entered Tibet, this time disguised as a beggar monk. Since she was travelling illegally, she mostly moved at night. She recounts fending off robbers and highwaymen by reciting songs or poems in her native language, French. Together with her unfamiliar European looks, that convinced the often very superstitious Tibetan robbers that she was a witch and to better not mess with her. In case that didn't work she was carrying a gun. She reached Lhasa as the first European woman the same year. She mingled with the crowd of worshipers and celebrated the Monlam Prayer Festival. She managed to stay for two month before she was discovered and had to leave. After 13 years in Asia, she decided to return to her home country.
In May 1925 David-Neel finally arrived back home in France. She wrote the book "My journey to Lhasa" and bought a house, which she turned into a buddhist temple that she called "Samten-Dzong" or "fortress of meditation".
In 1937, age 69, she again travelled to China to study buddhist scriptures. Again she also visited Tibet, studying scriptures at various temples. She returned back to France in 1946 at age 78. She went on to publish several books about buddhism and translated many buddhist scriptures from Tibetan to French.
In 1956 she went to stay with a friend in Monaco where she died in in 1969, one month before her 101st birthday.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_David-N%C3%A9el
https://himajomo.com/the-life-and-legacy-of-alexandra-david-neel/
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240313-trailblazing-journey-forbidden-city-of-lhasa
https://womeninexploration.org/timeline/alexandra-david-neel/
- Today I learned that LLMs understand base64!florian.github.io LLMs Understand Base64
A fun thing I recently learned about Large Language Models (LLMs) is that they understand base64, a simple encoding of text. Here’s a demonstration: the base64 encoding of What is 2 + 3? is V2hhdC...
Attached a pretty cool article covering it. This is something I never would have thought of before.
- TIL Illinois and Maine are the only US States that Mandate Paid Vacation Leavenatlawreview.com The State of Employment Law: Only Illinois and Maine Mandate Paid Vacation Leave
While 17 states and the District of Columbia have paid time off entitlements specifically linked to sick leave, states generally do not mandate paid vacation. In most states, paid vacation is a voluntary perk offered at the employer's discretion. However, two states break the mold and essentially re...
- TIL a high school teacher used an electric chair as punishment for misbehaving students.www.mentalfloss.com H.T. Opsahl, History’s Worst High School Teacher
In 1924, Opsahl sentenced disruptive kids to a high-voltage electric chair. Parents were not amused.
- TIL road fatalities per 100,000 people vary widely between major US States, Australian States and Canadian Provinces
Death rates correlate with education levels, urbanization rate, alcohol consumption, car size, driving laws, speed cameras, and road design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBPkI3CCY8o
- TIL about Michael Cox, a Police Officer that was "misidentified" by his fellow officers as a suspect and brutally beaten. He was left bleeding and they did not report the incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cox_(police_officer)
>In the early 1990s when Cox joined the Boston Police Department (BPD), crime was high in minority neighborhoods, and among BPD officers, loyalty overruled training, resulting in widespread brutality and a code of silence. BPD officers frequently used stop and frisk tactics on black men and women, and beat black men with impunity. Lying under oath was common. A mayoral blue-ribbon commission to reform the police and a permanent injunction placed by a judge had both failed to change police culture. As a plainclothes officer, Cox was mistaken for a suspect and briefly beaten while still in training, and once purposefully hit by a police vehicle and pinned to a wall. He recovered quickly both times so did not file complaints. > >In 1995, Cox's car was at the front of a high-speed chase which had involved several cars from the BPD and other departments. Cox continued the chase on foot, but was again mistaken for a suspect and this time badly beaten by four officers and hospitalized, suffering a serious brain injury. After the officers realized his identity, they quickly abandoned him to bleed on the sidewalk, and he learned only from newspaper reports that they had failed to report the incident. Cox began receiving harassing phone calls from other officers even before he had decided whether to file a complaint. A lawsuit ultimately led to BPD settling with Cox for $900,000 in damages, as well as $400,000 in attorneys' fees. No officer admitted to the beating. Following the battle in court, three of the officers were eventually fired, but one, Dave Williams, successfully sued for unjust termination and was returned to the service in 2006. Williams was again fired for brutality in 2009, and again reinstated.
>In July 2022, Cox was announced as the incoming commissioner of the Boston police by Mayor of Boston Michelle Wu. He was officially sworn in on August 15, 2022.
What an absolute shitshow.
Edit: More info:
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/boston-police-commissioner-michael-cox/ (Boston University Alumni Magazine)
Excerpts from this article (a very long read)
>Michael A. Cox, Sr., was laser-focused on the suspect running away from him. It was a freezing night in January 1995, and Cox—with a phalanx of fellow Boston police officers behind him—was chasing a car of homicide suspects through the streets of Dorchester and Mattapan and into a cul-de-sac that ended at a fence.
>Cox’s target jumped the fence and kept running. Cox, a plainclothes officer at the time, was right behind him when he felt a sharp crack to the back of his head.
>He fell to the ground and more blows followed—to his forehead, his ribs, his face. Other police officers, who had been farther back during the car chase, had mistaken Cox, a Black officer dressed in street clothes, for a suspect. Officers surrounded him, kicking and punching, until one of them noticed his police badge under his jacket.
>“Oh my God,” one of the officers breathed. Cox passed out. There was a long stretch of silence before anyone called for an ambulance.
>While Cox was shocked by the viciousness of the beating, he could almost understand how officers might have mistaken his identity. Almost. It was dark, his badge was under his parka, the chase had been intense, and sometimes in police work, a split-second decision means the difference between life and death. What he couldn’t understand—and still can’t—is the lie that followed.
>His fellow police officers closed ranks. They told his wife that Cox had slipped on a patch of ice. They wrote police reports that obscured what actually happened. Cox spent six months recovering from the most acute of his injuries. He spent four years waiting, and eventually demanding, in the form of a civil lawsuit, for some acknowledgment of what happened to him. He expected, if not justice, then at least an apology.
>Throughout all this, Cox was threatened, harassed, made a pariah in the department. But he never left. He stayed on the force, his presence a testament to a dogged determination to keep doing a job he loves.
>“I was thinking, ‘Why would I want to leave this job because some knuckleheads that maybe shouldn’t have been on the job in the first place are trying to force me out?’” says Cox. “So, I chose to stay.”
>As he lay in bed at home recuperating from the beating, Cox waited for an apology. He expected to hear from the officers who were responsible—or, at the very least, some acknowledgment from department brass. His belief in justice gave him confidence that the officers who mistook him, who hit him and left him out to dry, would do the right thing. Cox believed that right would win out over wrong.
>But the silence stretched on. Instead of offering an apology, officers wrote false or misleading reports that downplayed Cox’s injuries to mere clumsiness, Lehr writes in his book The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s Racial Divide, which he based on testimony, court documents, and interviews with those involved. Boston police investigators were similarly stonewalled: almost every officer they interviewed from that night said they hadn’t seen anything and didn’t know anything.
>“I just don’t understand how I can be dehumanized in that way,” Cox says in a recent interview. “And to have no one understand, and no one stand up for me? I was struggling.”
>His family urged him to quit the force and go public. Local activists and advocates called his house to let him know they were ready when he was. At the same time, the message he was getting from his department was: Let it go. Don’t make this a messy public affair.
>“There was certainly a period of time when I thought about leaving,” Cox says. “A lot of people thought that I should leave. But I’ll be honest with you: when I came on the job, I wanted to help people. I loved the job, and I worked really hard. I was an active police officer, actively involved in busting up gangs, arresting real criminals, murderers—things of that nature. I really felt that I was doing God’s work, so to speak.”
>So, Cox found a third way. He sued the city and several officers for violating his civil rights. He was ostracized from the department when he did, but he remained on the force.
>And in August 2022, nearly 30 years later, Michael Cox, 57, was appointed commissioner of the Boston Police Department.
Wow this is just...
Idk how people even put up with this.
I hope this guy tries to do some actual reform with his position, given what he went through, but I don't have high hopes given that... gestures broadly at US law enforcement nationwide
- TIL about REEForest, a EU project that aims to boost Mediterranean marine biodiversity by restoring an endangered species of brown algae
Brilliant name. Here's a small video for those interested: https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW273417062025RP1/
- TIL the smallest known reptile in the world is a chameleon
Pictured here is Brookesia nana, discovered in 2021 in Madagascar
Photo by Frank Glaw (herpetologist)
>Measuring just shy of 14 millimetres, B. nana can perch cozily on an aspirin tablet.
>For nine years, Brookesia micra, a cousin of B. nana described in 2012, clung to the title of tiniest chameleon. B. nana is smaller than B. micra in body size, measured from snout to cloacal opening at the base of the tail. But it sports a longer tail. Differences in how size is determined make it complicated to definitively claim that a species is the planet’s littlest.
Read more here: https://india.mongabay.com/2021/03/newly-described-chameleon-from-madagascar-may-be-worlds-smallest-reptile/
- TIL the pound was named because 240 Sterlings (pennies) weighed a pound.
Also, that the Sterling is the longest continuous use currency in the world.
- TIL that Orson Welles hated his nose and had a collection of fake noses he wore almost constantlycinemasojourns.com The Many Noses of Orson Welles
“When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.” – Orson Welles When you’re a film actor, it’s easy to understand how one can o…
- TIL about Hyperaccumulators, a low cost way of recyling contaminated soil
Hyperaccumulators are able to grow in contaminated soil and remove large amounts of toxic metals from the enviroment. The plants themself can later even be used to extract said toxic metals like quicksilver or lead.
- TIL the word dollar came from a combination of Jesus' grandfathers name and the German word for valley.www.saturdayeveningpost.com In a Word: The First Dollar | The Saturday Evening Post
To break from the British pound sterling, America chose a word with Bohemian roots.
- TIL about limnic eruptions, a type of natural hazard in which dissolved CO2 erupts from deep lake waters forming a gas cloud capable of asphyxiating everything in its path.
This happened twice in the 80s in Africa killing around 1700 people.
- TIL you can't enter non-ascii character as username on IRC ( Libera Chat )
I tried to enter my name "哎满" and it didn't work. I asked in libera chat and they said you can't enter non-ascii chars in IRC, only few IRC instances supports it since it could be easily abused.
Erroneous Nickname: 哎满
- TIL that I can drag a download link to my KDE desktop and it will automatically save the file to that location.
Not sure why I tried to do that. I knew when I did it that it wouldn't work and I was kicking my self for being stupid when the prompt showed up asking me to confirm that I wanted to download to that location. My jaw hit the metaphorical floor!
Now I'm wondering what other neat tricks I've missed over the years!
To be clear this is in Firefox on NixOS with the KDE6 desktop environment. No clue if it works on other browsers, DEs, or OSs.
- Today I learned spinster originally meant a woman who was amazing at weaving
During the late Middle Ages, married tradeswomen had an easier time obtaining higher-status, higher-income work than their unmarried peers. Unmarried women ended up with lower-status, lower-income jobs like combing, carding, and spinning wool—hence "spinster."Source.
- TIL in China, wearing a green hat is associated with being a cuckold
>In Chinese usage, the cuckold (or wittol) is said to be "戴綠帽子" dài lǜmàozi, translated into English as 'wearing the green hat'. The term is an allusion to the sumptuary laws used from the 13th to the 18th centuries that required males in households with prostitutes to wrap their heads in a green scarf (or later a hat).
- TIL the first use of the term "brain rot" was in Henry David Thoreau's Waldenpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review
Background/Objectives: The widespread phenomenon of “brain rot”, named the Oxford Word of the Year 2024, refers to the cognitive decline and mental exhaustion experienced by individuals, particularly adolescents and young adults, due to excessive ...
Lock in, chat. If you're on your sigma grindset (or your GenZ/Gen Alpha kids are) you might think I'm delulu, but it's true - Thoreau, a utopian philosopher with big W-rizz, lamented the issue, which he described as
one's inability to capture the essence of the condition of a gradual atrophy in the capacity to think critically, concentrate, and be in the world appropriately.It's not bussin, no cap. - Monopoly Go is the highest-budget video game so far.
Not GTA, not Star Citizen, not any game with actual gameplay, story, or anything like that.
Just a freaking Niantic reskin for freaking Monopoly.
I live in the wrong timeline.
