› added 2 months ago

16

TIL that despite spanning five geographical time zones, China officially uses just one—Beijing Time (UTC+8)!

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ENrx TIL that American pop-punk band Blink-182 had scheduled their 2016 album ‘California’ to be released on July 1st- the 182nd day of the year. Unfortunately for them, however, it was a leap year.
QJQk6 TIL that only about 10% of stock trades are done by actual humans. The remainder is done by high frequency trading algorithms and day trading bots.
ZpRdR TIL that Geospiza fortis - one if "Darwin's finches" - was the first animal species which scientists have observed evolving in real-time
AGe4 TIL that one of the seven princes of hell - Belphegor - who tempt people to make discoveries and inventions with the temptation of becoming rich off them is also the chief demon of laziness.
gje7 TIL that in Quake III Arena, when developers needed to calculate x^(-½), one used a piece of code and the hexadecimal number 0x5f3759df to calculate it about 4 times faster than floating-point division. It was so strange another developer commented in the code “what the fuck?”