TIL: Today I Learned

[Takhisis]

You also find castoreum in cigarettes, some wines and so on. Vegans are getting arsey about it.

I guess they don't like being the butt of the joke.

Some, but not all, brands of sugar use bone char to make the sugar white. So any product with added sugar has potential to not be vegan.

I am not surprised at all by this.

Thanx for that Birdjaguar. So it has just started but will probably spread quickly.
While it doesn't seem like much, it will make them lots of more money.

That's why you shouldn't gamble, either in casinos or state-run lotteries… or Wall Street.

 

[jarred!]

Most cane sugar gets filtered through bone char, although activated carbon is used some too. Beet sugar is generally refined in a different manner, and, generally, no bone char is used. Some cane sugar is sold that is unfiltered, this is usually referred to as 'raw.'

 

[rah]

I consider gambling entertainment and loses entertainment tax. I never gamble what I can't afford to lose, but I'm good with math so can make the money stretch out for good fun. Every now and then I even win. People that are gambling to win money are the ones that shouldn't be doing it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I consider gambling entertainment and loses entertainment tax. I never gamble what I can't afford to lose, but I'm good with math so can make the money stretch out for good fun. Every now and then I even win. People that are gambling to win money are the ones that shouldn't be doing it.

I rarely gamble, but when I do it is at the roulette table. It's a lovely game. I know enough to quit while I'm ahead too.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

There was a company I interviewed at and crashed and burned. TIL they are setting up their rocket factory in Mississippi and I've never been so glad to have flunked an interview. LBJ's economic development program (Apollo) is still paying off for the south, decades later.

 

[EgonSpengler]

TIL that flooding in Midwest farm country could soon impact the Gulf shrimp industry, as massive amounts of fertilizers wash into waterways and make their way downstream, mainly via the Mississippi, feeding algae and growing the Gulf's oxygen-depleted "dead zone." Animals that can flee, will; those that can't, will die. The article I read estimated that, from the day we stop poisoning the Gulf, it could take 30 years to recover.

 

[EgonSpengler]

TIL that actress & director Olivia Wilde is a descendant of Admiral of the Fleet Sir George Cockburn, 10th Baronet, GCB, FRS, First Naval Lord. While serving as a Rear Admiral in the North American Station, commanding the 74-gun 3rd-rate HMS Marlborough, Sir George is credited with the burning of Washington D.C. in 1814.

TIL there's a British chivalrous order called the Most Honourable Order of the Bath (GCB). Charles, Prince of Wales, is the order's current Great Master. There's also a Most Noble Order of the Garter. I think that was an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race.

 

[Hrothbern]

TIL that the frozen head of a Pleistocene wolf has been found.
Considering its size, it must have been a real menace for our ancestors !

The head was dated older than 40,000 years by Japanese scientists.
Scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History will examine the Pleistocene predator’s DNA.
‘This is a unique discovery of the first ever remains of a fully grown Pleistocene wolf with its tissue preserved. We will be comparing it to modern-day wolves to understand how the species has evolved and to reconstruct its appearance,’ said an excited Albert Protopopov, from the Republic of Sakha Academy of Sciences.
https://siberiantimes.com/science/c...giant-pleistocene-wolf-discovered-in-yakutia/

 

[Kyriakos]

TIL that the frozen head of a Pleistocene wolf has been found.
Considering its size, it must have been a real menace for our ancestors !




View attachment 526412

Possibly an ancestor of La Bête du Gévaudan

 

[Hrothbern]

Possibly an ancestor of La Bête du Gévaudan

Horror !

Makes me remember an old movie version of the Hound of the Baskervilles, that I saw as too young kid.
I could not sleep that night

 

[Kyriakos]

Horror !

Makes me remember an old movie version of the Hound of the Baskervilles, that I saw as too young kid.
I could not sleep that night

I read that in that period the french villagers attacked by the beast had developed the explanation that god was punishing them for their country kicking out the Jesuits.

 

[Hrothbern]

Bones... not the TV series... but close to it

TIL that bones adapt more strongly to our way of life than I was aware.

Bones are a very adaptable tissue. If you train for a short while on certain loads on your bones, for example for skiing or ice-skating, the truss structure of your upper leg bones will adapt fast to that load. Make them stronger for the direction of that load.
But not only from sports or certain physical jobs... our modern way of life makes our bones differing from those of our parents.

How about we having a "text neck" !
The spike-like feature, also known as the “external occipital protuberance”, found at the lower back of the skull, just above the neck, is growing when people use smartphones a lot.
Or us having narrower elbows than our parents.

Also interesting is that it could very well be that our change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural caused our small over-bite, and from there enabled us to speak easier "f" and "v" sounds.

And here there’s an unexpected twist. Incredibly, it now seems that the changes to our jaws and teeth have had one welcome side effect at least – on the way that we speak. A recent study found that, as societies discovered agriculture in the Neolithic period, roughly 12,000 years ago, the changes to our bites may have allowed us to pronounce new sounds, such as “f” and “v”. The researchers estimated that this transformed the languages that people spoke, from containing just 3% of these difficult sounds to 76% today.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190610-how-modern-life-is-transforming-the-human-skeleton

 

[Traitorfish]

TIL that "feckless" is derived from "effectless", an archaic Scots form of "ineffectual".

 

[Mouthwash]

This is a very interesting video about something I had, strangely, never known or heard about before today.

 

[Snerk]

France or colonialism?

I jest I jest.

 

[Kyriakos]

Til that Mueller (of the famous Mueller report, ie plan 100 to take Trump down when you have another election soon anyway) lied to congress to sell the second invasion of Iraq, claiming Iraq had WMDs.
I am surprised by this. How exactly does this record not mean much to Usians? Is this the kind of serious and trusted public servant you had at the forefront of some procedure against Trump? Shouldn't such people at least not have a tarnished record?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Americans have almost no direct say in these sort of appointments. Our opinion didn't matter much for this particular decision.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Til that Mueller (of the famous Mueller report, ie plan 100 to take Trump down when you have another election soon anyway) lied to congress to sell the second invasion of Iraq, claiming Iraq had WMDs.
I am surprised by this. How exactly does this record not mean much to Usians? Is this the kind of serious and trusted publiic servant you had at the forefront of some procedure against Trump? Shouldn't such people at least not have a tarnished record?

I'm not sure the US has reckoned with the invasion of Iraq in any meaningful way. I've seen it written that the 2006 midterm elections were some kind of rebuke of the Bush Administration over the war, but I haven't looked to see whether there was any systematic removal from office of the Congress members who voted for it. When Hilary Clinton was running for the Presidency in 2016, I didn't hear a single person who opposed her mention the war (the "Lock her up" chants that became ubiquitous were about the email server scandal and the incident in Benghazi, when she was Secretary of State). I think Bernie Sanders did bring it up in the Democratic Primary, but I'm not sure how big a factor it was.

The "Neo-Cons" who engineered the invasion have mostly gone quiet, but people like Mueller and Clinton were never Neo-Cons anyway. iirc, there were only a few members of Congress who voted against the invasion (Bernie Sanders was one of them, I can't remember who the others were).

 

[Lexicus]

Americans have almost no direct say in these sort of appointments. Our opinion didn't matter much for this particular decision.

That isn't really what Kyriakos is asking, though. Mueller became a sort of superhero to liberals (including many liberals right here in OT!) despite the fact that he is a cop and a spook.

@Kyriakos bear in mind a number of the "neocons" and interventionists are now serving in the Trump administration. It seems likely that they will try to engineer a war with Iran if they think they can do it.

 

[Kyriakos]

That isn't really what Kyriakos is asking, though. Mueller became a sort of superhero to liberals (including many liberals right here in OT!) despite the fact that he is a cop and a spook.

Exactly. I was susprised that such became a hero and one to rally behind. I call that "The Hillary effect" ^_^