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In the United States, giving birth is 20 times more lethal than skydiving.
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If an election in New Mexico is tied, the two candidates play a single hand of poker as a tiebreaker.
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There is a restaurant in New York that only employs grandmothers as their chefs.
The menu is set by the grandmothers in charge that night, and consists of her family recipes.
(Image: Garrett Ziegler; CC BY-NC-ND.)
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"Rubber duck debugging" is the practice of debugging software by explaining what you meant the program to do to the duck.
Often, explaining the process will cause the programmer to figure out what they did wrong.
(Image: Tom Morris; CC BY-SA.)
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. ALDOUS HUXLEY
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"Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets." NEIL GAIMAN
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Site of the Day: artist Uli Westphal has charted the evolution of the depiction of elephants in the Middle Ages when European illustrators did not know how the animal actually looked and had to rely on second-hand sources. bit.ly/3B61a34
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Charles Dickens wrote to a friend that his annoying house guest Hans Christian Andersen ‘speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that.’
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Cats can’t taste sugar.
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Because the video for Janet Jackson’s song ‘Rhythm Nation’ contained a natural resonant frequency for a certain model of laptop hard drive, it would crash laptops playing the video. It could even crash laptops within earshot which weren’t playing it.
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In 2007, Russia planted a Russian flag on the Arctic sea floor to claim the area as Russian territory.
The Canadian foreign minister responded that "this isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’ "
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Writer of ‘Groundhog Day’ Danny Rubin has said that there is only one appropriate way to make a sequel to the original film. It would be called “Groundhog Day II: Return to Punxsutawney” and would just be a repeat of the original movie.
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‘Alphabet fatigue’ is a phenomenon whereby a dictionary team becomes less and less thorough as they move through the letters of the alphabet. For instance, the first edition of ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ had three volumes: A-B, C-L, and M-Z. (h/t @MerriamWebster)
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Since he tried to record everything that was ever known into his books, St Isidore of Seville (560 - 636CE) is the unofficial patron saint of the Internet.
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HTTP 451 is the error code returned when a web page cannot be displayed because it is illegal to display that content.
It was chosen as a reference to censorship in Fahrenheit 451.
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A ‘libfix’ is a part of a word that’s ‘liberated’ and used to create new words. Libfixes include the ‘gate’ from Watergate (making eg plebgate and partygate); the ‘athon’ in marathon (eg walkathon and telethon); and the ‘licious’ in delicious (eg bootylicious, babelicious).
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Word of the Day: QUOMODOCUNQUINZING (17th century) - making money any way you can.
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One of the contenders for the Japanese Word of the Year 2022 is 顔パンツ(Kao pantsu) that literally translates as ‘face underwear’ and expresses the idea that in the pandemic era, not wearing a face mask in public is as embarrassing as not wearing pants.
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Northern Ireland is facing a clown shortage.
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There is a pizzeria in Guatemala that cooks their pizzas on lava from an active volcano.
(Image: Carlos Urrutia; CC BY-SA-NC.)
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Research shows that heterosexual men who learn to play extreme metal guitar are mostly motivated to do so in order to impress other heterosexual men.
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Thomas Aquinas identified five types of gluttony:
Laute - eating food that is too luxurious
Studiose - eating food too daintily
Nimis - eating too much food
Praepropere - eating at an inappropriate time
Ardenter - eating too eagerly
Tag yourself.
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In 2005, a man named Ronald MacDonald robbed the Wendy's restaurant where he worked.
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‘Irn-Bru’ has its own tartan.
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A FIT OF THE CLEVERS is 19th-century Scots for a sudden burst of activity when you realise how much work you have to do.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves