Today I Learned

Sarajevo Safari is the name for an alleged war tourism phenomenon during the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996) involving human hunting. According to the reports, wealthy foreign nationals were enabled, for large monetary fees, to shoot at civilians in the besieged city with sniper rifles for entertainment purposes.

A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.

I single out bats (Chiroptera, “hand-wings") because those other ones are already under the grandorder Ferungulata. Scrotifera just brings the bats into the fold.

Over 90% of those deaths are Americans.

This is so much easier than pressing hard on the bottom side of the touchpad why did no one tell me this was a thing 😭😭

The highest-specific-impulse chemistry ever test-fired in a rocket engine was lithium and fluorine, with hydrogen added to improve the exhaust thermodynamics (all propellants had to be kept in their own tanks, making this a tripropellant). The combination delivered 542 s specific impulse in vacuum, equivalent to an exhaust velocity of 5320 m/s.

And the author of this article is tying himself into a pretzel trying to absolve Tolkien of this great shame.

In the early 19th century, humans and orcas had an agreement in Australia, until humans broke it.

TIL why the Mona Lisa became so famous I’ve always wondered why the Mona Lisa is so admired when there are so many other famous paintings from the Renaissance. What surprised me is that its fame didn’t come from one single thing. Leonardo’s technique, the painting’s history, its connection with the Louvre, and especially the attention it received after the 1911 theft all played a role

WTF

TIL that generative AI is changing how teachers assess student work.

The Mesozoic marine revolution (MMR) refers to the increase in shell-crushing (durophagous) and boring predation in shallow-sea (neritic) and some deep-sea marine organisms throughout the Mesozoic era (251 Mya to 66 Mya), along with bulldozing and sediment remodelling in benthic marine habitats

We don’t know how pterosaurs evolved powered flight. The most primitive, probable, ancestor of pterosaurs had a bodyplan closer to that of a kangaroo. And the earliest pterosaurs like Preondactylus or Eudimorphodon were already fully capable of flight.

Hong Xiuquan was a Chinese religious leader who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He led the Taiping Rebellion, which established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Riding Giant Mechanical Tricycles, 1896

Vine-Glo was a grape concentrate brick product sold in the United States during Prohibition by Fruit Industries Ltd, a front for the California Vineyardist Association (CVA), from 1929.

It’s like a very quiet Digg or (old) Reddit. Niche content covered by passionate individuals. The way the web was meant to be. While I wasn’t able to log in with my piefed account, I was able to use my mastodon one, which is pretty cool.

Here, using high-resolution satellite-retrieved data and interpretable machine learning techniques, this study quantified the impact of NEVs on atmospheric pollution, specifically particulate matter particles with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and particles with an aerodynamic diameter of 10 μm or less, and evaluates the corresponding health benefits. By 2023, NEVs led to reductions of 23.80% in particles with a diameter of 2.5 μm or less (8.97 µg m−3) and 30.67% in carbon monoxide (0.26 mg m−3), resulting in the prevention of approximately 262,000 non-accidental deaths and 75,000 all-cause deaths, respectively.

For the most part the predicted market peaks and troughs are pretty accurate. This is more of a statistical analysis (using past numbers to predict future behavior) than a Nostradamus getting high and pulling predictions out of his ass.

You’d actually say it as R. rattus rattus or Rattus r. rattus.

The Flashpoint Archive is a big project to preserve old web games (Adobe Flash based games, animations etc).