› added 1 year ago

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TIL that symbols to denote irony or sarcasm in print have been around since at least the 1500s

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oBoV8 TIL that Phil Zimmerman, the developer of PGP, named the symmetric-key cipher of PGP v1.0 as "BassOmatic", based on a Dan Aykroyd SNL skit involving a blender and a whole fish to illustrate that the BassOmatic algorithm does to data what the original BassOmatic did to the fish
wLLZ6 TIL that "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of writer's block" is the shortest academic article ever: it has no words
a8M6y TIL of the 'reuzegommers', a group of 'elite' students (children of judges and politicians) who killed a new Initiate. They were sentenced to community service and it was forbidden to publish their names. YouTuber Acid was later convicted of cyberstalking for identifying them.
oRw08 TIL that Eratosthenes paid a guy to walk 800 kilometers to a tower to measure the length of it’s shadow & that’s how we found out the earth was round.
p85OG TIL A guy known as the coughing major, won $1 million dollars on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire by having people he knows in the audience cough at the right answers as they were being said by the host. He eventually got caught as show producers reviewed footage and found out he was cheating.