› added 2 years ago

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TIL the Pentagon launched up to 25 unmanned, high-altitude, solar-powered, mass surveillance balloons over the US in 2019

Read more theguardian.com

via reddit.com

M7ekW TIL under German law, self-driving cars must be programmed to avoid human death at all cost. This means the car is allowed to destroy property, accelerate beyond legal speeds, and hit animals to avoid hitting a human.
mA4v TIL of Flying ace Erich Hartmann. Destroyed 352 enemy planes. Crashed 14 times due to mechanical or debris damage from planes he killed. Never once shot down.
nWwGP TIL in the mid-20th century, a researcher wore a pair of hand-engineered goggles that completely inverted his eyesight. Although he "stumbled wildly" at first, after 10 days he had grown so accustomed to his upside-down world that "paradoxically" everything began to appear rightside-up to him again.
R7oXl TIL of Julie D’Aubigny, who was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer who once took vows at a convent just so she could have sex with another nun, and then set it on fire. When she kissed a women at a ball, she was challenged to a duel by 3 men and she then beat them all.
Z4Vv TIL that Iceland makes unusually extensive and public use of its ID numbers and that this has eliminated the need for the country to conduct a regular census: population statistics can be obtained by simply querying a database open to everyone.