› added 13 years ago

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TIL in 1995, Newsweek published an article to suggest that the Internet was doomed to die. “So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?”

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6E96X You’re in luck. For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical.
O0Q4 TIL Ozzy Osbourne deliberately married his second wife, Sharon Arden, on the Fourth of July so that he would never forget their anniversary.
Bg6dr TIL Christians disapproved of the gladiator games in the Roman Empire because they involved idolatrous pagan rituals, and the popularity of gladiatorial contests declined in the fifth century, leading to their disappearance.
8aEVa TIl of The “rural purge” of American television networks (in particular CBS) which was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows that led toward ones with supposedly more appeal to urban and suburban audiences.
epxyL TIL: The US government owns 1.4 billion pounds of cheese storaged hundreds of feet below ground in converted limestone mines in Missouri.