› added 11 years ago

94

TIL that America is the only developed country on earth where the current generation is less educated than the previous generation

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neEdd TIL some plants that relied on extinct animals to disperse their seeds now rely on rodents, who will bury them. The seeds travel further when other rodents steal them, and bury them again, and again, and again, etc.
VMJDB TIL Canada publishes an insanely great a "Homeowner's Manual" for its citizens covering things like basic and advanced maintenance, common problems, how to avoid disasters, emergency preparedness and even landscaping
GYdLQ TIL the main cause of "soft errors" in computer memory is cosmic rays. Systems buried in caves have a negligible rate of cosmic-ray induced soft errors; computers on mountains have a far higher error rate than at sea level; and the rate of errors in aircraft can be over 300 times the sea level rate
5YaLn TIL that the first computer game was Nim, released in April 1940 on a computer called the Nimatron, which weighed over a ton. The designer was a nuclear physicist and quantum mechanics pioneer who later participated in the Manhattan Project. 100,000 games were played, with the computer winning ~90%
RmD8 TIL: Joseph Stalin in 1944 encouraged Polish resistance fighters in Warsaw to rebel against their German occupiers, then ordered his nearby army units not to help. The resulting German victory annihilated any who could feasibly challenge Stalin’s rule once the Soviets liberated Warsaw in 1945.