Today I learned that LEGO has a program where you can send them your old LEGO (bricks, pieces, mini-figs, etc). LEGO will then take them in, wash / sterilize them, and donate them to children in need!
Over the last 5 decades, more than 90 of Stockholm's 100 metro stations have been decorated with mosaics or paintings by hundreds of artists. The metro system is sometimes called “the world’s longest art gallery.”
#TodayILearned that #SantaClaraCounty operates the first (and only?) drug donation pharmacy, where they take surplus drugs from healthcare providers and give them away FOR FREE to anyone with a prescription. They’ll even mail it to you if you want.
#TodayILearned that the delicious Mexican fruit sauce #Chamoy probably derives its name and recipe from the #Philippines’ “kiamoy”, which is a fruit sauce made with the same recipe. That recipe was in turn derived from a #Hokkien#Chinese recipe brought by Chinese immigrants, who called it 鹹梅 “kiam-mui” (literally: salted plums).
As a Hokkien descendant who loves #Mexican#fruit salads, this makes me happy.
Basically, in this tale a farmer's girl lost her way in the forest and stumbled across a hut inhabited by seven dwarves. She asked them for a place to stay for the night, and received it (after the dwarves argued about who would get the honor of giving up his bed for the girl)....
#TodayILearned that Bing Crosby was the world's very first major investor in magnetic recording tape, specifically so he could record his daily live New York show and re-broadcast it in California later. He spent today's equivalent of several million dollars on the first experimental machines, thus allowing for more R&D and arguably laying the groundwork for the entire resulting computer industry. Thanks, @clive! https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-bing-crosby-made-silicon-valley
Why YSK: In many places it can take years for a case to come to trial. Judges have to make a decision in such cases to determine whether an accused person should be jailed in the interim. In recent years many jurisdictions have adopted algorithmic tools that essentially create a “risk profile” which assigns a value....
#TodayILearned that #macOS#Spotlight will not index #iCloud Drive documents unless they are fully downloaded—unless you are searching for keywords stored in their extended attributes.
This is a surprisingly big oversight. The more you use #iCloudDrive to store your documents (which Apple somewhat encourages you to do), the more likely you won’t be able to find them by searching for their content with Spotlight.
Stumbled across a fascinating YouTube channel about national parks (worldwide), and #TodayILearned that the US National Park Service brochure employs a design system called the #Unigrid, designed by none other than #MassimoVignelli, who said it was one of the most important projects he ever worked on -
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano était un esclave affranchi d’origine ghanéenne, figure de la lutte abolitionniste.
Son ouvrage "Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery" (1787) ferait de lui le premier auteur anti-esclavagiste noir.
Conférence de Jennifer Pitts, Collège de France, 14 mai 2024 :
"Les Lumières et l’esclavage : Cugoano, Condorcet et les débats sur l’abolition à la veille de la Révolution"
"In 1876, at the age of 27, she desired to marry an older lawyer who was not to her mother's liking; she argued that her daughter could not marry a "penniless lawyer".[4] Her disapproving mother, angered by her daughter's defiance, locked her in a tiny, dark room in the attic of their home, where she kept her secluded for 25...
#TodayILearned that Richard M Daley is even more awful than I thought. As mayor of Chicago in 2008, he sold more than 36,000 parking spots to a company financed by Morgan Stanley and the Emir of Abu Dhabi to operate for SEVENTY FIVE YEARS for the measly sum of $1.16B.
Today, the company has made over $1.6B back on its investment, and it has SIXTY MORE YEARS to keep raking in money.
This is possibly one of the worst municipal privatization disasters, because you can bet that company will use some of the money it rakes in to obstruct legislation that might turn Chicago into anything BUT a congested, car-centric city for the rest of our lifetimes.
“Chicago has a problem until the year 2083.” by Stand-Up Maths
Wow. I grew up in 1970s #Indonesia reading Bobo, a magazine for kindergarteners and elementary kids. It was a magazine published by Gramedia, an Indonesian publisher, and featured the adventures of a blue bunny named Bobo and his extended family, as well as a collection of recurring characters like a pink elephant (Bona) and her cat friend (Rong Rong), and other articles.
#TodayILearned that Indonesian Bobo was likely translated from an English magazine called Bobo Bunny, featuring the same cast of characters (the pink elephant is Pinky Puff, and the cat is Purr). That magazine, in turn, was translated from a Dutch magazine called Bobo, which was founded by an Italian cartoonist, Sergio Cavina, who created the blue bunny in 1968 and drew every edition until 1994.
Anyway, Bobo lives on to this day on https://bobo.grid.id, though he looks way more modern.
#British diplomats had known about #Hitler as a character, & the likely consequences of National Socialism about a decade before his ascent to Chancellor.
#TodayILearned#TIL Samuel L. Jackson has made around $357,161,000 from his movies. He averages around 2200 words per movie in 156 movies. That's about $1040 per word.
"Motherfker" was 1116 of those words.
Samuel L. Jackson has made roughly $1,160,640 from saying "Motherfker"
Effectively, the voltage on ships is often evenly split at the socket so protectors may trip on what they think is the hot wire surging but leave the other still live to potentially overheat and start a fire. Which is bad, m'kay.
I’m in the Norwegian woods;
reading ‘Norwegian Wood’.
So, of course (?) I played the Beatles’ song on a lark and now can’t stop thinking about the Droster effect.
TIL of a folk tale named "Death of the Seven Dwarves" (www.digitale-sammlungen.de)
Basically, in this tale a farmer's girl lost her way in the forest and stumbled across a hut inhabited by seven dwarves. She asked them for a place to stay for the night, and received it (after the dwarves argued about who would get the honor of giving up his bed for the girl)....
TIL that over 60% of jurisdictions in the US use algorithmic pretrial assessment tools to help determine who should be jailed before their court date and who should not.
Why YSK: In many places it can take years for a case to come to trial. Judges have to make a decision in such cases to determine whether an accused person should be jailed in the interim. In recent years many jurisdictions have adopted algorithmic tools that essentially create a “risk profile” which assigns a value....
TIL that in industrialized countries, the most widespread contact allergy is to nickel, impacting 8-19% of adults and 8-10% of children, with women being 4-10 times more likely to be affected than men. (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL about Blanche Monnier, a French woman who was kept locked in a small room for 25 years after she tried marrying someone her mother didn't like. She laid there in her own excrement, starving, for over 2 decades. (en.wikipedia.org)
"In 1876, at the age of 27, she desired to marry an older lawyer who was not to her mother's liking; she argued that her daughter could not marry a "penniless lawyer".[4] Her disapproving mother, angered by her daughter's defiance, locked her in a tiny, dark room in the attic of their home, where she kept her secluded for 25...