Today I learned...

[Wayne Potgieter]

One of my favourite subreddits is "Today I Learned". A place you can post about some totally random fact you learnt about as long as you can back it up with some sort of source. I thought that you might all like to play...

[Wayne Potgieter]

Ill get us going....

 

In 2016, the swedish tourism council wanted to celebrate having 250 years of "free speech" so they created a single phone number that connected the caller to any random Swedish person in Sweden.

 

Over the 79 days that the campaign ran, almost 200,000 calls were placed with a combined total of 365 days worth of conversations. 

 

https://www.theswedishnumber.com/

[River Rat]

Not so much today but between Christmas and New Year we were on a bush walk in big five country and I smelt popcorn, turns it was a leopard that had marked it's territory.https://wildlifeact.com/blog/the-smells-of-nature/#:~:text=When%20leopards%20mark%20their%20territory,the%20area%20marking%20its%20territory.

[Spinnekop]

Turtles drink water through their noses.

[RocknRolla]

Going back to work is every bit as painful as I imagined.

[stefmeister]

Most bizarre story I've learned about;

 

Worst Niagara Falls promotion ever

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/03/niagara-falls-animals-boat

Edited January 12, 2021 by stefmeister

[Rocket-Boy]

Most bizarre story I've learned about;

 

Worst Niagara Falls promotion ever

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/03/niagara-falls-animals-boat

Wow that is just terrible, humans can be such horrible creatures sometimes.

[Grease_Monkey]

Most bizarre story I've learned about;

 

Worst Niagara Falls promotion ever

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/03/niagara-falls-animals-boat

 

 

That is really strange to say the least!

 

And stranger than that is the fact that people would willingly send themselves over the edge in barrels!? No wonder we haven't been contacted by intelligent extra terrestrial life. 

[travisza]

The definition of "supercilious". Saw another bikehub user make use of it earlier so I had to google and find out.

[DR ◣◢]

Today I learned that the BMI calculation originated in the 1830. 

 

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/255712#:~:text=Body%20mass%20index%2C%20or%20BMI,BMI%20has%20some%20important%20flaws.

[Zebra]

...that the Windows 95 'start-up' jingle, when switching the computer on, was:

 

1. composed by Brian Eno, ex Roxy Music and about 1000 other projects, and...

2. It was written on an APPLE MACINTOSH, for a P.C. (digging the irony in that!)

 

Brian Eno said he had never ever used a PC, hated the things, so designed a PC jingle, on a Mac...

 

Source HERE:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno 

 

The Microsoft Sound[edit]

In 1994, Microsoft designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Eno to compose music for the Windows 95 project.^[67] The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, "The Microsoft Sound". In an interview with Joel Selvin in the San Francisco Chronicle he said:

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem – solve it."

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be ​3 ¹⁄₄ seconds long."^{[† 1]}

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made eighty-four pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.^[68]

Eno shed further light on the composition of the sound on the BBC Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity, admitting that he created it using a Macintosh computer, stating "I wrote it on a Mac. I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them."^[69]

 

Cheers!

Chris

[Stretch]

The other day I learnt that bogs retain the most carbon above anything on the planet. We should not be disturbing them by digging them up, planting trees on them or erecting wind turbines. Distributing then releases all that carbon that would take decades to reclaim. Bogs are more important than trees

[Pieter1]

The other day I learnt that bogs retain the most carbon above anything on the planet. We should not be disturbing them by digging them up, planting trees on them or erecting wind turbines. Distributing then releases all that carbon that would take decades to reclaim. Bogs are more important than trees

I read something similar about grasslands the other day. I did not expect that. Pretty cool.

[Spinnekop]

Today I learned about the word "bog"
 

[Bonus]

This thread has perfect timing because I learned something yesterday that I've been dying to tell someone! 

 

A volume of Snow, 1m x 1m x 10cm, weighs 100kgs!

 

No wonder tree branches and electrical cables snap!....

[Bateleur1]

This thread has perfect timing because I learned something yesterday that I've been dying to tell someone! 

 

A volume of Snow, 1m x 1m x 10cm, weighs 100kgs!

 

No wonder tree branches and electrical cables snap!....

 

I heard different figures.  Where did you get this info. Would like to read up on it.  I am sure density can differ.