› added 10 years ago

603

TIL there’s a DNA test that can identify a criminal’s race, but police refuse to use it

Read more archive.wired.com

via reddit.com

Lkv0v TIL that David Kirkpatrick adopted the stage name "Slim Dusty" in 1938 at age 11. He went on to release 118 records (60 studio albums)
4Ly6 TIL A South African IT company preferred to use a pigeon to transport a 4GB flash drive over 80 km (50 mi) instead of using the country’s biggest ISP’s ADSL. Including downloading, it took two hours for the data to arrive, the same amount of time it took to tranfer 4% of the data over the ADSL.
Br0rW TIL that when the Catholic Church wanted to canonize someone, there was a church official, the advocatus diaboli, whose sole job was to argue against that person's qualifications for sainthood. Advocatus diaboli is latin for "Devil's advocate."
690ZW TIL about Iceland's most famous witch trial in 1656, where a father and son, both named Jón Jónsson, were burnt at the stake for using "farting runes" (magical symbols) to curse a woman and a priest with chronic abdominal pain and weakness.
rRx84 TIL UK's national anthem changes from"God save the Queen" to "God save the King" depending on the gender of the reigning monarch