› added 11 years ago

1063

TIL that the distorted words in CAPTCHAs (the anti-spam feature) are all taken from old books and newspapers. By identifying the words, users are actually helping to transcribe these printed sources to the internet. As a result, the entire New York Times archive is now searchable back to 1850.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

k8wm TIL that smokers actually cost society LESS in healthcare dollars, due to earlier average age of death.
dDaeK TIL that the Pythagorean theorem must have been known before Pythagoras, because it is used in a proof on a Babylonian clay tablet dated about 12 centuries before the birth of Pythagoras.
OokxR TIL the Quakers won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947.
web8 TIL that there is a verse in Dante’s Inferno that has no translation and no one knows what it means.
jNMba TIL in the 1880s, 20% percent of autopsies performed in Iceland revealed echinococcosis, a type of tapeworm that can be passed from dogs to humans, causing blindness and severe complications. As a result, the city of Reykjavik had a ban on keeping dogs as pets for decades.