Today I Learned (TIL)
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4199810
- www.cbsnews.com Gloucester researchers use "SnotBot" drone to study whales like never before
Ocean Alliance in Gloucester is using drones to get a close look at whales off the coast of Massachusetts.
>Ocean Alliance began working with drones in 2013. Within the last few years, they began collecting exhaled breath condensation, also known as "whale snot."
>The whale snot is a biological jackpot with DNA, microbiomes, and hormones. This data was nearly impossible to collect from a live whale.
>"I've seen more unique behaviors from a drone in the last five years than I've seen in the previous 25," Kerr said.
They’re apparently also using the drones to tag them for GPS tracking, really cool use for them.
From Wikipedia
Stampede events that involve humans are extremely rare and are unlikely to be fatal.\[5\] According to Keith Still, professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University, "If you look at the analysis, I've not seen any instances of the cause of mass fatalities being a stampede. People don't die because they panic. They panic because they are dying".\[5\]
Paul Torrens, a professor at the Center for Geospatial Information Science at the University of Maryland, remarks that "the idea of the hysterical mass is a myth".\[5\] Incidents involving crowds are often reported by media as the results of panic.\[16\]\[17\] However, the scientific literature has explained how panic is a myth which is used to mislead the attention of the public from the real causes of crowd incidents, such as a crowd crush.\[18\]\[19\]\[20\] […] [M]ost major crowd disasters can be prevented by simple crowd management strategies.\[22\] Crushes can be prevented by organization and traffic control, such as barriers. […] Such incidents are invariably the product of organisational failures.\[4\]
It might be for just my instance, not sure.
A friend was talking to a young butcher telling him about how this crazy guy comes to the supermarket to BUY rotten meat! Butcher kid can't think of WTF anybody would to do with rotten meat. My friend tells him it's probably to make dog food.
Later my friend find a post that talks about Four D meat: Dead, Dying, Diseased, or Down And how it is used to make dog food
The link above point to a dog search on the topic
- www.nytimes.com What Is Offside in Soccer? (Published 2022)
Understanding the rule can be tricky. This is your guide.
The linked article includes animations for each of the different cases
I was browsing Radio Locator and clicked on the Other category where among reading services and exactly one electronic station was a cluster of shopping stations.
Gutzon Borglum was the sculptor and was involved with the KKK. He was chosen because he was the sculptor of the "Shrine to the Confederacy” which was the inspiration for Mount Rushmore.
Guess it shouldn’t be too surprising given the way the land was taken from the local tribes despite it being sacred.
Credit to this comment by u/alcoholicorn that drove me to look it up.
- www.newschannel5.com Surplus food apps can save you big money on groceries
Millions of dollars of food are thrown away every month by stores and restaurants. Some new apps can find stores and bakeries near you, where you can buy surplus food for pennies on the dollar.
- Too Good to Go
- Flashfood, where you can order groceries nearing their best by dates for up to 50% off, then pick them up in local supermarkets
- Misfits Market
- Olio
Note: I haven't used any of these, I can't speak for them. I do think it's cool for the environment and people on a budget though.
- allergyasthmanetwork.org Olympic Athletes With Asthma | Allergy & Asthma Network
Asthma is the most common chronic condition among Olympians. Find out how athletes with asthma manage their condition and stay in the game.
- www.pbs.org An extremist’s path to academia -- and fighting terrorism
Jesse Curtis Morton begins work as a counterterrorism researcher at George Washington University this fall. But his path to the position was highly unconventional: until 2012, Morton was Younus Abdullah Muhammad, a Muslim extremist who founded a radical Islamist website. His decision to go undercove...
Federal prosecutors once regarded Jesse Curtis Morton as a threat to national security.
The FBI said the pro-jihadist website he helped found, RevolutionMuslim.com, inspired a number of terrorist plots. On that website, militant training videos, bomb-making instructions, praise for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and chat rooms for discussions among members created a multi-media stew of toxic content, they said.
In 2012, Morton was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for his role in running the site.
Now, just four years later, Morton is free and has been hired as a terrorism analyst at a George Washington University-based think tank.
>Blanter accompanied the Red Army to Berlin in early 1945. He was commissioned by Stalin to compose a symphony about the capture of Berlin. However, when Vasily Chuikov was meeting with a German delegation led by Hans Krebs to negotiate their surrender following Hitler's suicide, Chuikov had several uniformed war correspondents pretend to be members of his general staff in order to appear more professional and intimidating at the negotiations. But Blanter was also meeting with Chuikov at the time the delegation arrived and he could not pass as a Red Army officer as he was wearing civilian clothes. Thus, Chuikov shoved him into a closet just before the delegate entered the room. While he remained there for most of the conference, he eventually lapsed into unconsciousness from a lack of air, collapsing out of the closet and into the room just as the delegates were preparing to leave, embarrassing Chuikov and astonishing the Germans.
- https:// www.cbc.ca /sports/olympics/2.7171/rio-condoms-record-1.3693294
TIL Seoul 1988 was the first Olympics to have condoms distributed, with a supply of 8500 with increases ever since. However there is no research evidence that athletes competing in the Olympics would be more likely to seek out casual sex
- www.qualtrics.com The Original Names of 25 Famous Companies
Do you ever wonder how different life would be if you had been named something different? When it comes to branding, the right name can make or break the outcome of a company’s trajectory.
- www.usatoday.com How much is that remote job worth to you? Americans will part with pay to work from home
American workers save thousands of dollars when they work from home and will accept a lower salary for a remote position, research shows
TIL 18th Century Norwegian swashbuckler Peter Tordenskjold once ran out of ammo during a sea battle so he sent his enemy a letter thanking him for "a fine duel" and asking him to send more ammo so they could carry on. The two crews then toasted each other's health and went their separate ways.
- • 97%
TIL Colorado isn’t a rectangle and actually has 697 sides, mostly due to poor measurement tools
www.atlasobscura.com Colorado Is Not a Rectangle—It Has 697 SidesThe Centennial State is technically a hexahectaenneacontakaiheptagon.
- www.fisheries.noaa.gov Fun Facts About Luscious Lobsters
Fascinating facts about our tasty lobster friends.
> B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
> Influenced by BCPL, PL/I, TMG > > Influenced C
> B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine-independent applications, such as system and language software. It was a typeless language, with the only data type being the underlying machine's natural memory word format, whatever that might be. Depending on the context, the word was treated either as an integer or a memory address.
- detoxtorehab.com Stephen King: Alcoholism, Drug Addiction and Fame - Detox To Rehab
Stephen King, the World-Acclaimed Author Battled With Alcohol and Drug Addiction for Many Years. King's Story is One of Heart-break, Struggle and Triumph.
- neurosciencenews.com A Switch Telling the Brain When to Learn and When to Remember - Neuroscience News
Study reveals a neural signal in the hippocampus that enables the brain to alternate between learning and remembering modes.
Archive is background info via this BBC post from 2023, but that's just one piece. Yeah, a lot of us have seen the photo, and maybe some of us know it was during the Viet Nam War, during Civil Rights protests in the U.S. and not that long after the assassination of MLK. Maybe you even know that Muhammad Ali lost his belt and was banned from boxing in the U.S. for refusing the draft to Viet Nam: > "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?"
I did not know the Black Power Salute got all 3 athletes BANNED from the Olympics and pretty much ruined their lives. From NPR post for 50th anniversary: > Both men received hate mail and death threats. There was discussion of stripping them of their medals. Many Americans shunned them for their silent gesture: For years, they struggled to find good jobs. Their marriages suffered under that strain. Their children were bullied at school. Employers shied away from them. > >And Smith and Carlos were banned from future participation in any Olympics for life. (They were in their early 20s in Mexico City, and this effectively prevented them from competing in other races in Munich and Montreal.) There were no offers of the complimentary stadium tickets usually offered to medaled athletes. > >(Peter Norman suffered many of the same indignities when he returned to Australia. He was ostracized, never allowed on an Australian Olympic team again, despite qualifying in several national trials.[...]
Which gets us to The White Man In That Photo (from 2015 -- long and worthy of a full read):
> Norman was a white man from Australia, a country that had strict apartheid laws, almost as strict as South Africa. There was tension and protests in the streets of Australia following heavy restrictions on non-white immigration and discriminatory laws against aboriginal people, some of which consisted of forced adoptions of native children to white families. > >The two Americans had asked Norman if he believed in human rights. Norman said he did. They asked him if he believed in God, and he, who had been in the Salvation Army, said he believed strongly in God. “We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat, and he said “I’ll stand with you” – remembers John Carlos – “I expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes, but instead we saw love.” > >Smith and Carlos had decided to get up on the stadium wearing the Olympic Project for Human Rights badge, a movement of athletes in support of the battle for equality. > >They would receive their medals barefoot, representing the poverty facing people of color. They would wear the famous black gloves, a symbol of the Black Panthers’ cause. But before going up on the podium they realized they only had one pair of black gloves. “Take one each”, Norman suggested. Smith and Carlos took his advice. > >But then Norman did something else. “I believe in what you believe. Do you have another one of those for me”? he asked, pointing to the Olympic Project for Human Rights badge on the others’ chests. “That way I can show my support for your cause.” Smith admitted to being astonished, ruminating: “Who is this white Australian guy? He won his silver medal, can’t he just take it and that be enough!”.
So they all go to the podium in solidarity and the U.S. winners give the salute and suffer the aftermath. More from 'white guy':
> As John Carlos said, “If we were getting beat up, Peter was facing an entire country and suffering alone.” For years Norman had only one chance to save himself: he was invited to condemn his co-athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s gesture in exchange for a pardon from the system that ostracized him. > >A pardon that would have allowed him to find a stable job through the Australian Olympic Committee and be part of the organization of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. Norman never gave in and never condemned the choice of the two Americans. > >He was the greatest Australian sprinter in history and the holder of the 200 meter record, yet he wasn’t even invited to the Olympics in Sydney. It was the American Olympic Committee, that once they learned of this news asked him to join their group and invited him to Olympic champion Michael Johnson’s birthday party, for whom Peter Norman was a role model and a hero. > >Norman died suddenly from a heart attack in 2006, without his country ever having apologized for their treatment of him. At his funeral Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Norman’s friends since that moment in 1968, were his pallbearers, sending him off as a hero.
Note that the 'white guy' article talks about a commemorative statue built in 2005 of just Smith and Carlos -- no Norman. Norman approved that artistic choice. Transcript from Democracy Now where Carlos himself explains how he called Norman to hear him say so (part 1 and part 2):
> JOHN CARLOS: Yeah, “Blimey, John. You’re calling me with these blimey questions here?” And I said to him, I said, “Pete, I have a concern, man. What’s this about you don’t want to have your statue there? What, are you backing away from me? Are you ashamed of us?” And he laughed, and he said, “No, John.” He said—you know, the deep thing is, he said, “Man, I didn’t do what you guys did.” He said, “But I was there in heart and soul to support what you did. I feel it’s only fair that you guys go on and have your statues built there, and I would like to have a blank spot there and have a commemorative plaque stating that I was in that spot. But anyone that comes thereafter from around the world and going to San Jose State that support the movement, what you guys had in ’68, they could stand in my spot and take the picture.”
The U.S. (but not just the U.S.) has a woeful history of treating those who protest Injustice horribly. There's always an excuse for it, too. From the above articles, we can see that the Olympic head allowed the Nazi salute for the
MunichBerlin games but expelled Smith and Carlos in 1968 with the rational that the first was a national salute and therefore acceptable whereas 'Black Power' was not.More recently, Kaepernick kneeling got him in trouble with the NFL but they were fine with Butker's speech that, "denounced abortion rights, Pride Month, COVID-19 lockdowns..." and suggested women should be homemakers instead of using their newly earned college diplomas. Supposedly the 'difference' is that Kaepernick's silent protest was on the NFL's time but Butker spoke on his own time so it was fine ... but they can always find a difference and it is never as valid as simply siding against injustice.
EDIT: I inadvertently typed 'Munich' instead of the correct 'Berlin' games for when the Nazi salute was allowed. Fixed now.
- www.smithsonianmag.com Scientists Discover 'Dark Oxygen' on the Ocean Floor Generated—Surprisingly—by Lumps of Metal
Researchers found that electric currents from polymetallic nodules are behind this alchemy—the same minerals that deep-sea miners are targeting
- www.insideedition.com Dad Hopes to Learn What Happened to Daughter Who Left Home in 1987
Cassandra Durham's father, Michael, tells Inside Edition Digital he last saw her at their home in Baltimore, Maryland, in August 1987.
