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TIL George Lucas gave a speech in 1988 to Congress about the need to protect films from being altered. “People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians.”

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P1kQO TIL Microsoft released the AI chatbot Tay (short for "Thinking About You"), designed to mimic a 19-year-old American, on March 23, 2016. It became a PR disaster when it learned offensive language from trolls, causing Microsoft to shut it down after just 16 hours and sparking debates on AI ethics.
wLxXP TIL Werner Herzog directed a documentary with 88 year old Mikhail Gorbachev in 2019. Herzog began the program by apologising for being a German because he assumed they wanted to kill him growing up, but Gorbachev said kindly Germans were his grandfather’s neighbours
0w0Vy TIL about Jericho, a city in Palestine with history all the way back to 10,000 BCE. It is known as the earliest settlement to have a defensive wall, 1.8 metres high, and the first tower, 8.5 metres high. The people domesticated wild cereals and pulses, hunted wild animals, held rituals and made art.
4kp8J TIL that the only sound recordings in existence of someone born in the 18th century speaking, are of Helmuth Von Moltke the German field commander.
GY6aJ TIL the FDA allows 11 rodent hairs per 25g paprika, 60 parasitic cysts per 100 fish, 2500 aphids per 10g of hops, and 1 maggot per 250ml orange juice