› added 12 years ago

221

TIL That in some regions withing China farmers have to pollinate apple trees by hand. This is due to the lack of any bees, which is in turn due to mass extermination of “pests” carried out by Mao Zedong during the great leap forward. (more links in comments).

Read more chinadialogue.net

via reddit.com

ejgE TIL that during the filming of Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm distracting the dinosaur with a flare was included at Jeff Goldblum’s suggestion, as he felt a heroic action was better than going by the original script, where like Gennaro, Malcolm would get scared and run away.
epv6D TIL about Cooper's Law. The law states that the maximum number of voice conversations or equivalent data transactions that can be conducted in all of the useful radio spectrum over a given area doubles every 30 months.
GYK0j TIL Nutmeg contains a hallucinogenic compound called myristicin. You can get high with doses of 15 g of grounded nutmeg, and the effect include, hallucinations, dizziness and memory impairment of the trip. This is why it was part of prison culture in the middle of the twentieth century.
gGl9 TIL of a study measuring whether the tiredness/hunger of a judge affected the prospects of getting parole. At the beginning of a session, a prisoner had a 65% chance of being parolled, the authors found. This declined to almost zero by the end of a session, and leaped back to 65% after a break.
KOMV6 TIL that the BTK serial killer Dennis Rader, who killed 10 people between 1974 and 1991, was finally caught after sending a 1.44MB diskette to the police - which they told him was untraceable - containing metadata from a deleted MS Word file.