› added 8 years ago

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TIL that “Cotton Candy” is called “Fairy Floss” in Australia, “Grandma’s Hair” in Hebrew, “Father’s Beard” in French, “Ghost’s Breath” in Afrikaans, and “Girl’s Hair” in Arabic.

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4X4R6 Today I learned that each train car of coal loses up to 3% of its load, a literal ton of coal, as dust when it is traveling from the mine to the power plant.
w7bP TIL That the scene in Matrix Reloaded when Trinity hacks into a power station’s computer is actually an accurate portrayal of a hack exploiting a real SSH vulnerability.
4kkM6 TIL about Ocular Herpes Simplex Keratitis. This is HSV of the eyes. While 1/3 of humans have genital HSV, about 1.4M people have OHSK. Also, Keratitis is the #1 cause of cornea-related blindness.
6adZ TIL that the Portuguese Man-O-War is not a jellyfish, but a siphonophore, which is a colonial organism.
xVYeD TIL that Chinese science fiction writer Chen Qiufan published a short story using paragraphs automatically generated by AI, based on his own writing. That story won him a literary prize in a contest moderated by an AI judge, over Nobel laureate Mo Yan