› added 11 years ago

200

TIL MI6 hacked an al-Qaeda website and replaced it’s bomb-making instructions with a cupcake recipe.

Read more zdnet.com

via reddit.com

OoaW4 TIL Henry Ford really hated jazz. He associated it with Jewish and black people, calling it "Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of calf love." To counter the popularity of Jazz, Ford poured tons of money into country music.
Njdb TIL 62 decimal digits of pi is all that is needed to calculate the circumference of the known universe to Planck length precision
p8Jd8 TIL: Power lines are made of aluminum and not copper because even though aluminum lines must be 1.5 times thicker to match the same conductivity, they're still 2 times lighter.
7krO TIL that onions and other members of the genus Allium can be deadly for dogs, cats, guinea pigs, monkeys and other animals.
Wkak8 TIL that the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) sect of Judaism and the Quaker sect of Christianity are both named after the exact same word (Isaiah 66:2): "Yet to such a one I look: To the poor and brokenhearted, who 'quakes' (חָרֵד in the original Hebrew, pronounced 'hared') before my word"