› added 2 months ago

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TIL that Ray Cats were proposed to alert future generations of nuclear waste buried in an area - they would change color - And there is even a song that would play over and over titled “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)”

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16Q4P TIL since 1850, more than 5,000 individuals have attempted to cross Niagara Falls, either intentionally (as stunts or suicide attempts) or accidentally. Of these, only 16 have survived.
VMXw0 TIL that it takes roughly 150 flowers to yield 1 gram (0.035 oz) of dry saffron threads.
99Rm TIL that adding “but you are free to refuse” after a verbal request can double your chances of getting what you want.
ne4Eo TIL There are classes in Japan that teach kids how to use the Soroban abacus to develop faster skills in arithmetic. After a few years they no longer even need to use a real abacus to perform fast mental calculations since they can already visualize an image of it
epQM6 TIL for most engineering, scientific, and everyday computer calculations, only about 15 to 17 decimal places of Pi are used, because this matches the precision of double-precision floating-point numbers, the standard format for numerical calculations in modern processors