In 2018, a biologist wrote a paper based on the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Threshold" (one of the silliest episodes in Star Trek history) and submitted it to 10 open-access journals to expose their predatory practices:
"charging authors publication fees without providing the editorial services associated with legitimate journals, such as careful peer review and vetting of the paper's claims."
#TIL: You want to declarative configure your firefox but you have no idea what all those settings in about:config are and the web is not helpful?
You can just copy ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js to a temporary directory, change the setting in the Firefox UI and then diff the two files and voila, you got the key and value to write into your #NixOS config.
#TIL that there were two airports so close to each other but located on different sides of the Israeli–Jordanian border that a commercial pilot mistakenly landed in #Aqaba, #Jordan 🇯🇴 instead of #Eilat, #Israel 🇮🇱 in November 1986. At that time, both countries were technically at war with each other.
#TIL Heavy water absorbs infrared instead of red light, so if you spend billions of dollars to fill a swimming pool with heavy water, it would look transparent and no longer be blue.
#TIL that Sanora Babb's research on Dust Bowl camps was shared without her knowledge or permission, to John Steinbeck, whose novel The Grapes of Wrath made it to the shelves before her Whose Names Are Unknown . . . and as a result, hers was shelved and not published until 2004.
#TIL that German is the third official language in #Belgium (I thought it was only Dutch and French!) and that there are more folks speaking Dutch than French as their first language in Belgium (I thought it was the other way around!).