› added 9 months ago

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TIL that there are two kinds of freedom. A person alone in a desert has the perfect negative freedom to choose where to die. A person on a highway has the positive freedom to drive wherever they want, in large part because they don't have the negative freedom to drive on the wrong side of the road.

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Bevk TIL that if we had a spacecraft that could “simply” accelerate at a constant 1g (the acceleration rate of free-falling objects due to gravity), then the passengers would be able to travel through the entire KNOWN universe, not merely the observable universe, in just one lifetime.
0d4mL TIL: The oldest condoms ever found so far are dated between 1642 and 1647. They were probably made from pig or sheep intestines. They were found during an Archaeological excavation in the cesspit of Dudley Castle in West Midlands, England.
OLr6 TIL there was a man-made mouse utopia called Universe 25. It started with 4 males and 4 females. The colony peaked at 2200 and from there declined to extinction. Once a tipping point was reached, the mice lost instinctual behaviors. Scientists extrapolate this model to humans on earth.
BgxVK TIL "Threes Company" is a remake of a British sitcom
6E4eW TIL that in 1948 a high school student by the name of Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264.4 hours for a science fair project. He was monitored by a Stanford sleep researcher and contributed notably to the science community. Following he slept for 14 hours and suffered no observable health issues.