› added 5 years ago

323

TIL in 1981 a man named Roger Fischer had an idea for a volunteer to have ICBM launch codes put in their chest cavity. In the event of an emergency, the volunteer would carry a knife to be killed with. It was meant to force the personal killing of one man to start the impersonal killing of millions.

Read more boingboing.net

via reddit.com

ADBM4 TIL about Microtargeting where machine-learning algorithms ingest large amounts of voter data to divide the electorate into narrow segments and predict which individual voters are best target to persuade or turn out in an election
69e7 TIL that a rooster in Basel, Switzerland was sentenced to burn at the stake for committing the “heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg”.
yQjv TIL that in order to get around the constitutional limits on copyright the MPAA president proposed to make it last “forever minus one day”
Z8bnQ TIL that when choosing the name for a Chinese baby, families often follow a "generation name" to pick one of the characters in the name. Such poem is written in advance, and can predetermine the names of thirty-two or more generations, such that after hundreds of years the names spell out the poem.
VBWjG Today I learned that the comedy folk band 'The Lancashire Hotpots' were forced to change the title of their song "The Beer Olympics" due to copyright claims by the IOC. They then renamed the song "The Beer International Non-Profit, Non-Governmental Sporting Quad Yearly Event."