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!).
Die GLS Bank hat enge historische und ideelle Verbindungen zur Anthroposophie, auch wenn sie sich selbst nicht als "anthroposophische Bank" bezeichnet.
Anthroposophische Wurzeln
Die GLS Bank wurde 1974 von dem Anthroposophen Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff gegründet.
Barkhoff wollte mit der Gründung der Bank anthroposophische Werte wie Nachhaltigkeit und ethisches Wirtschaften in die Praxis umsetzen.
Anthroposophische Mitarbeiter und Kunden
Viele Mitarbeiter und Kunden der GLS Bank haben einen anthroposophischen Hintergrund.
Anthroposophen schätzen die Bank wegen ihrer Ausrichtung auf ethische Geldanlagen und Nachhaltigkeit.
Finanzierung anthroposophischer Projekte
Die GLS Bank finanziert seit langem anthroposophische Einrichtungen wie Schulen, Altenheime und landwirtschaftliche Betriebe.
Es besteht eine enge Zusammenarbeit und Verbindung zu vielen anthroposophischen Initiativen und Unternehmen.
Obwohl die GLS Bank offen für alle Kunden ist, hat sie durch ihre Gründungsgeschichte und Ausrichtung deutliche Bezüge zur Anthroposophie. Diese Verbindungen prägen die Bank bis heute.
#TIL the #TeReoMāori verb mate ā-moa which means "to be exterminated, disappear, lost forever", or just simply "extinction".
mate itself just means 'dead', among other things (https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/3845).
This is cool that the language adapted from a social/ecological thing (moa becoming extinct), and created a verb to explain it. So becoming dead like the moa is being dead forever, mate ā-moa. They probably didn't have a concept for it.
#TIL: 1929 wurde in #Prag die internationale Vereinigung der Puppenspieler und Figurentheater-Interessierten (UNIMA) gegründet, und die Lektorin findet, ihr solltet das ebenfalls wissen.
#TIL la majorité des câbles sous-marins reliant le Japon à la côte Ouest des USA arrivent en Oregon.
Instinctivement, j'aurai dit qu'ils atterrissaient pour la plupart en Californie (il y en a aussi).
#TIL 2 : En Californie, 3 câbles atterrissent (c'est le bon terme d'ailleurs ? 🤔) dans la baie de Morro. Les gens ayant joué à Cyberpunk 2077 (ou les anciennes personnes ayant joué à Cyberpunk 2020 à l'époque) reconnaîtront l'endroit où ce trouve l'emblématique ville de la franchise
#TIL there was no 39th US state. When the Dakotas were admitted on November 2, 1889, President Harrison shuffled both states' Act of Admission papers and didn't look at which one he was signing first, to not give either state preference.
Though there were numerous 39-star American flags produced, since the splitting of Dakota came pretty late in the admission process.
#TIL Un vélo a 4 roues, un moteur thermique et 1 à 2 tonnes d'acier.
Si j'en crois le fait qu'en 2 passages devant le carrefour au bout de ma rue, dont la voie d'en face est un sens interdit sauf pour les vélos et les bus : 1 "vélo" empruntant cette voie à chaque passage. Ce n'était pas des bus : pas assez de place dedans
#TIL that in 1929, JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, gifted his work's copyright to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.
"Through this gift, Peter Pan’s magic made an unprecedented leap from the realm of fiction into reality and the hospital began to receive royalties every time a production of the play was on, as well as from the sale of Peter Pan books and other products."
"if fixed, undisturbed, in free air, not exposed to radiation, fire, or sun, but in the ordinary light of a well-ventilated room or outer air, the chemical mixture in a so-called storm-glass varies in character with the direction of the wind [...]"
Sometimes I look up from whatever weird subject I’m learning and marvel at the fact that I get to learn random things for work. Recently it’s been bathymetry and deep sea exploration, for a talk in Romania in two weeks where I relate them to distributed tracing for microservices-based systems. I love my job. https://notes.nicolevanderhoeven.com/Bathymetry
#TIL we can turn off tracking protection to see images in #ThreadReaderApp, albeit in odd sizes, affecting layout.
#Nitter avoids tracking, shows replies, connects to other posts, etc, but the popularity of this thread by @trishgreenhalgh (1m views on birdsite) is taxing its remaining servers... https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances