› added 11 years ago

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TIL that the trick from “Office Space” and “Superman III” of stealing tiny fractions of a cent from a large number of transactions to stealthily accumulate a stolen fortune has a name: salami slicing

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PYMZJ TIL Japan has a national exercise routine and millions of people across Japan do the same routine at the same time.
QJnZ6 TIL near the end of WWI, a small fortified town in France called Le Quesnoy was liberated from the Germans after four years of occupation, by New Zealand soldiers in a sneak attack, with zero civilian casualties. Multiple memorials and many of the town's streets are named in NZ's honour.
dDvmQ TIL that in 1885 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used 300,000 pounds of explosives to annihilate Flood Rock island in New York City's East River as part of clearing Hell Gate for safer navigation. It's been described as "the largest planned explosion before testing began for the atomic bomb".
R7nXw TIL Chimpanzees have got all the cognitive abilities necessary for the human-only practice of cooking. They understand that cooking is a process - that food is transformed into a tastier form; they don’t do it in the wild because they’ve never learned to manage fire.
7ryMp TIL the idiom "a few bad apples" is actually "a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel" and refers to the fact that even if the majority of a group of people are 'good', if there are a few 'bad' or 'corrupt' people in the group, it invalidates everything else.