› added 6 years ago

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TIL that a person working in the telecom industry made an AI bot to prank telemarketers that talks to them until they catch on as he was annoyed with telemarketing calls. He created an algorithm that says, "Hello? hello?" to trick the agent to thinking they have reached their target.

x64nk TIL the author of the Dr. Dolittle series, Hugh Lofting, created the book in a series of letters to his children while he was fighting in the First World War as a way to spare them from the horrors he was witnessing being committed on both humans and animals alike
p8vVe TIL that the moon is 1/400th the size of the sun but also 1/400th the distance from Earth which results in the moon and the sun being the same size in the sky, a coincidence not shared by any other known planet-moon combination.
Z845v TIL that in 2008, fossilized ink sacs we recovered from preserved remains of Belemnotheutis cephalopods. Mixed with ammonia solution, the team was able to return the ink to its liquid form and used the ~150 million year old ink to draw a replica of of the original illustration of Belemnotheutis.
NX8Ne TIL that the 1963 movie Charade starring Audrey Hepburn, immediately entered the public domain upon release because Universal failed to properly display the copyright notice. The film notice omitted the word 'Copyright', 'Copr.', and the symbol '©'.
WnJ8 TIL that not only are there feral macaque colonies in the United States, one of the ones in (of course) Florida is infected with a particularly virulent strain of Herpes that has a mortality rate of over fifty percent in humans.