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Approximately 1% of the static on old TV sets is caused by leftover radiation from the Big Bang.
777
@qikipedia
As of 2021, the three most popular flag emoji are the rainbow flag (🏳️🌈), the U.S. flag (🇺🇸), and the red flag (🚩).
778
@qikipedia
Naming a cow can increase the milk yield by 500 pints a year.
Image: Martin Vorel (CC0)
779
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Isaac Newton was such a bad teacher that no one enrolled in his classes.
Since his contract required he teach, he sometimes lectured at an empty room.
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You can tell a legless lizard from a snake because it blinks.
781
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The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will have been forgotten. THE NEW YORK TIMES in 1925 on crosswords
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Bees can be pessimistic.
783
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Competitive chair-sitting is an endurance sport that involves sitting in extreme environments like deserts or the Antarctic from sunrise to sunset without a watch and any electronic devices. The sport was invented by Robert Silk, who to this day remains its only practitioner.
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"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." NEIL GAIMAN
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Word of the day: LYCHNOBITE - someone who works at night and sleeps all day
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Word of the Day: FORJESKIT (Scots) - exhausted from working too much
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Word of the day: DOYCHLE (19th century Scots) - to work even though you're half asleep
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The word ‘rhubarb’ comes from two Greek words ‘rheon’ and ‘barbaron’. ‘Barbaron’ means ‘foreign’, and ‘rheon’ means ‘rhubarb’, so ‘rhubarb’ is a ‘foreign rhubarb’.
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Saccadic masking is the process by which the brain edits out the motion of our eyes. Look in a mirror, first at one eye and then the other. You won’t be able to see your eyes move but an observer standing next to you will.
Image: Petr Novák
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From 1987 to 2015, it was more lucrative to invest in Lego than in bonds, wine, or gold. (Study: bit.ly/33tbVRq.)
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Word of the Day: SLUMMOCK - to pass the time aimlessly or idly.
792
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Word of the Day: DIURNATION - the habit of sleeping during the day
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In 1879, ‘Punch’ predicted video calls: In this cartoon, parents ‘set up an electric camera obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire’.
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According to one account, Homer died from ‘grief and vexation’ when he couldn’t solve a riddle posed to him by fishermen. It went ‘what we caught, we left behind; what we missed, we bring along’.
Comment your guesses below (and don't get as stressed as Homer if you can't get it)
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When IKEA first came to the US, American customers were buying flower vases to drink from, because IKEA’s own drinking glasses seemed too small to them.
796
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Introverted Chinese millennials have been known to call themselves jingfen, or ‘spiritually Finnish’.
797
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The technology for the Roomba was originally created for military robots clearing minefields.
798
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In 1964 Swedish art critics praised the debut of 'Pierre Brassau', whose paintings were later revealed to be the work of a chimpanzee.
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Scientists at the University of East Anglia spent seven years trying to discover why men exist.
800
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Word of the Day: SLEEVEEN (Irish English) — an untrustworthy person.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves