› added 26 minutes ago

TIL that the same sodium lamps used for street lighting in the past were also used to light "greenscreen" (chromascreen) and was much better at it but isn't used anymore, being last used in Dick Tracy (1990)

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b680a TIL about “ telephoning for catfish” Southern fishers in the 1950s jury-rigged components of old crank-style telephones to send an electric current through the water and stun fish, and it only works on fish with no scales, like catfish.
0wPMv TIL about Aristarchus of Samos, who was the first person ever to hypothesize that the Earth revolves around the Sun almost 2,000 years before Copernicus, as well as the idea that distant bodies like stars were exactly like our own Sun and contained planets.
VBdkp TIL Dalai Lama is a Mongolian title. It is a combination of the Mongolic word dalai meaning "ocean" or "great" (coming from Mongolian title Dalaiyin qan or Dalaiin khan, translated as Gyatso or rgya-mtsho in Tibetan) and the Tibetan word བླ་མ་ (bla-ma) meaning "master, guru"
N77Ze TIL that alcohol is used in freezer thermometers as it has a lower freezing point than other fluids
vNOx TIL that price of broadband in American is triple that of UK and France, and 5x greater than South Korea