› added 8 years ago

604

TIL the Euro currency was designed featuring imagery of fictitious bridges to represent architectural styles throughout time in Europe. They had to be careful not feature one country over the others, though, but the Netherlands then built the bridges in real life anyway.

Read more 99percentinvisible.org

via reddit.com

4XMwa TIL: Traditional chess engines – rely on thousands of rules and heuristics handcrafted by strong human players that try to account for every eventuality in a game. AlphaZero takes a totally different approach, replacing these hand-crafted rules with a deep neural network .
Lk1Qm TIL The success of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure led to the creation of a cereal called "Bill & Ted's Excellent Cereal"
loBrA TIL that before WWI Kaiser Wilhelm tried to impress Queen Wilhelmina of Holland by telling her "My guards are seven feet tall and yours are only shoulder-high to them." her reply was, "Quite true, Your Majesty, your guards are seven feet tall. But when we open our dikes, the water is ten feet deep!"
awQb9 TIL that wasps are essential in the production of wine. The yeast which is found on the surfaces of mature grapes and triggers fermentation cannot survive winter temperatures outdoors. It survives and breeds in the stomachs of hibernating wasps, who spread it among grape plants each year.
AyJl TIL of a 2005 British TV show that successfully convinced several members of the public that they were going into space as a space tourist. Even though they never left the ground and the whole show was an elaborate practical joke.