Post * 7JGO — Curious Curator

› added 10 years ago

76

TIL Napoleon demanded a method of communication that would not require light or sound. ‘Night Writing’ was developed as a tactile military code, but proved too difficult for Napoleon’s troops to learn and was rejected. Night writing became the basis for braille.

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e08kL TIL Not only do bats make high-pitched sounds for echolocation, many bat species also sing. A team of scientists that analyzed one species’ song translated it as a sequence that opens with a hello, then a gender identification, then some geographic information, & then a "let's talk" section.

JOLB TIL that a high school football coach got half the fans of his own team to cheer for the other team, because the other team was from a maximum-security juvenile correctional facility and didn’t have any fans of their own.

kODr5 TIL Spaniards jokingly refer to former PM Luis Carrero Blanco as 'Spain's first astronaut', because his car was blown onto the balcony of a nearby building during his assassination

G8wE TIL there is a programming language called Malbolge, specifically designed to be almost impossible to use. When it was created it was so difficult to understand that it took two years for the first Malbolge program to appear.

ZVWD TIL That Inverted totalitarianism is a term coined by Princeton University political philosopher Sheldon Wolin to describe the emerging form of government of the United States, very much like the regimes of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.