› added 11 years ago

1067

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

xVQK5 TIL historically, pleats (folds in a chef's hat) represented how many recipes a chef knew. A chef with 100 pleats may know 100 different ways to boil an egg or prepare a chicken.
4jVb TIL: Diet Pepsi is not vegan but the company don’t say what animal product is used.
QNgJk TIL a common way to treat severe epilepsy is to sever the Corpus callosum, splitting the brain in half. Patients who undergone this have little to no change in function.
N70Y8 TIL the iconic music from “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” was made in the 1960s by German composer Heinz Kiessling, who died in 2003, two years before the show premiered.
45oX TIL the ancient Babylonians worked out that there are solar eclipses that occur 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours apart. This period, 223 lunar cycles, is called the Saros cycle. The 1999 eclipse and this year’s eclipse are Saros cycle solar eclipses.