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TIL During the Middle Ages the Church tolerated prostitution because it helped to prevent rape, sodomy, and masturbation, which it saw as worse

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VM4XB TIL about Doug Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" at SRI in 1968. He presented the demo of technologies such as mouse pointer, realtime document collaboration, hypertext links and video conferencing, in 1968, 52 years ago
ENYX TIL William Beckford, at age 10, inherited a fortune and spent it on sailing the world with a cook, two dogs, 24 musicians, and a Spanish Dwarf.
gMrdX Depending on your beliefs (and luck), when you drop dead, a variety of things await what’s left of your handsome corpse. If you’re Christian, you might be put in a box, and your friends will come by to tell each other how great you look. Nobody said this when you were alive—but hey, take what you can get! Hindus are typically cremated, and if you’re a Jedi, you might meet a similar fate while surrounded by Ewoks.If you kick the bucket in certain parts of Mozambique, a wake of vultures might gather round and peck out your lifeless eyeballs. After devouring your eyes, these scavenging birds will most likely move on to your butt. Like Sir Mix-A-Lot—but for different reasons—vultures are preoccupied with the derriere. Vultures are just opportunists, and they naturally go after the soft spots first.National Geographic Explorer Jen Guyton is studying mammal ecology and conservation in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. In this week’s Today I Learned, Guyton explains that vultures are eating more tush than usual due to loss of larger scavengers. Bon appétit!Click here to read more on why vultures are important.
E16Z7 TIL Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during launch and was on the verge of being aborted before a single Flight Controller realised that flipping a little known switch would restore enough systems to save the mission.
E14Yd TIL that Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World was sent an email from a high school girl who talked about how she didn’t quite fit in with others, wasn’t part of any social groups, and felt like she was stuck in “the middle”....so he wrote a song about her.