› added 3 months ago

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TIL After Machiavelli's works were placed on the first Papal index of prohibited books, his family challenged the decision. The church eventually offered them to allow publication of a censored version of his works, with the author's name suppressed. His grandsons indignantly rejected the offer

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6vZm TIL that when setting up the Jeopardy! challenge involving the Watson supercomputer, IBM repeatedly expressed concerns that clue writers would exploit cognitive deficiencies in order to turn the show into a sort of Turing test. A neutral third party had to be brought in to select the questions.
78Y9Z TIL of the iQue Player, a handheld Nintendo 64 system released only in China after video game consoles were banned there in 2003. Content servers were still up until 2018.
pngp TIL a parasitic barnacle will infect a crab, castrate the males, make them think they’re female, and force them to carry around the barnacles brood as if it is their own
4kXm6 TIL Pigeons can see their butts and faces at the same time because they have 360/2D vision (almost)
rNyMy TIL in 1892 Edward Doheny couldn't pay his rent when his daughter died followed by his wife committing suicide. He borrowed money and devised a drilling system using a tree and drilled the first oil wells in Los Angeles becoming an oil tycoon. The movie There Will Be Blood is loosely based on him.