› added 8 years ago

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TIL During the 1980s the Swiss army fired off shells during an exercise and mistakenly burned a patch of forest inside the country Liechtenstein. The incident was said to have been resolved “over a case of white wine”.

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kJnPE TIL hairworms, parasites which infect crickets and control their brain, can extend a male cricket's lifespan by removing his ability to chirp so it's harder for predators and competing crickets to find him. Hairworms may even share their immune system with its host.
kOb91 TIL Hard Drives are Drive "C:/" because originally PCs only had up to 2 floppy disk drives labelled A and B, some time later hard disks got added and became drive C.
LkANr TIL about survivorship bias and its application in the military. A statistician used the survivorship bias in his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The military wanted to reinforce the areas where the bomber was shot up instead of looking where it wasn't hit.
1Nr4 TIL Ikea used East German political prisoners as slave labor
KOKRG TIL that the Food & Drug Administration has long known the shelf life of some drugs can be extended, sometimes by years but continues to order pharmacies to trash expired drugs. In fact, the federal government has saved a fortune by doing this with their own emergency stock piles.