- #Neanderthal remains show evidence of healed wounds and even medicinal plant treatments, indicating they were intelligent and empathetic toward each other? This contrasts with notions of Neanderthals as dumb or uncaring cavemen.
- the remains of a 6 or 7-year-old child w/severe genetic impairments has been found? This indicates this vulnerable child was cared for, kept safe, & fed by the community, further dispelling notions of Neanderthals as savage and brutal.
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I’m listening to a #history podcast about the #StoneAge & I learned some new and/or corrected information about Neanderthals. Did you know:
-most of the modern population has small amounts of #Neanderthal DNA? Neanderthals & Homo sapiens commonly interbred before N’s extinction.
- the idea that Neanderthals hunted big animals by driving them off cliffs is a Victorian misconception? They actually used risky & complex bottling, ambush, and close-range techniques when hunting.
1/
Today I learned that YouTube has search modifiers! Who knew!? I found the initial list on the Reddit post below, but had Gemini expand upon it and create the list in the image attached.
Does anyone know of anymore? Like specifically hiding channels from search results?
(I found these on a old Reddit post - https://www.reddit.com/r/everyoneknowsthat/comments/18bj0n9/some_youtube_search_parameters_to_help_our_search/)
#TodayILearned that Ozzy Osbourne's wife Sharon originally met him because of being the daughter of his manager; that her first interaction with him was an angry confrontation over him stealing cash from her; that the conversation ended with her offering to become his new manager; and that the moment he said yes, the first thing she did was sue her own father over control of Osbourne's career, a suit that lasted for years and permanently destroyed their relationship.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/arts/music/ozzy-osbourne-dead.html
#TodayILearned that only seven companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and NVIDIA) make up an entire 35% of the entire wealth in the American stock market. That seems....dangerously unstable.
I remember reading about how French revolutionaries tried to replace the 7-day week with 10-days in the 1790s, but I never knew the Soviets tried something similar. Both wanted to move people away from religious activity on Sundays (among other goals).
From 1929-1940, industrial workers in the USSR had staggered 5-day work cycles. Four days on, one day off, with 20% of employees off on any given day, and the factories never shutting down. It was a big increase in leisure time (1/5 instead of 1/7) but schedules didn't usually match your family or friends so the time had less value.
The experiment was brought to an end by the Nazi invasion in 1940 when they shifted back to 7 day cycles.
#TodayILearned that despite the retconned story about how America proudly embraced the wins of the black Jesse Owens at the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin, most Americans actually shunned and ignored Owens when he came back with his medals, even to the extent of Franklin Roosevelt refusing to invite him to the White House.
#TodayILearned that you can use some very basic HTML to customize the text in zenity windows on #Linux.
@keirFox #TodayILearned houses can change size. I wish mine were bigger and had more rooms.
Ha! I just realized that I have been using the em-dash (—) in a mix of Dutch and English. In Dutch they use ( - ) with spaces, in English, the em-dash without spaces (—). I do this — with spaces.
Maybe I picked it up form Dutch and thought they were using —, but they were using the small -.
Thanks to @OnzeTaal .
#TodayILearned that technically the victims of the Jim Jones Massacre drank down their poison with Flavor-Aid, which makes the term "drinking the Kool-Aid" technically a genericide, or when a specific brand name becomes so popular, it becomes a generic name for any item similar to it. (See also: Crayon, Jacuzzi, Kleenex, and Band-Aids, although as far as I know, none of these others have ever caused the mass death of 918 people.)
#TodayILearned that a car company in #Indonesia sold Porsche 911 clones in the 1990s that used Mazda engines located in the FRONT of the car.
Details are hazy, but it seems that an executive of Indomobil spun off a company called Marvia that took Porsche 964 body parts and basically cloned their shape, likely by making fiberglass molds from them. The body panels were then mounted on a Mazda MR90 chassis, retaining its 70 HP engine.
While Marvia was making these clones, Indomobil was working on a deal with #Porsche to sell the 996 in Indonesia. Of course, once Porsche got wind of the clone, the deal was called off.
Only 50 Marvia clones were made. Some people speculated that some “Marvias” were actually Porsches that were imported illegally into Indonesia, and given Marvia VINs.
So bizarre!
#todayilearned that viewing and exploring large #csv files works very well with #dbeaver
it has a custom data provider that interprets a folder with #csv files as tables
#TodayILearned that Billie Eilish's Grammy-winning debut album was recorded in her childhood bedroom using a Yeti USB mic and the consumer software Logic Pro.
#TodayILearned that the local-path provisioner in Kubernetes, at least in K3s, doesn't actually pay any attention to the storage size limit set in the volume claim.
So I thought I had a volume that had run out of space, when it actually didn't give a shit what I put. As long as the system disk had enough space, that was good enough. Uh, that's fine I guess to start?
Today I learned about the "batch" Linux command.
If your computer's busy right now and you want to queue something up for when it's free, open a terminal, type batch, and press enter. You'll get a special command prompt into which you should type the commands you want the computer to run. Press enter after each one, then Ctrl+D when you're done.
Perfect for ffmpeg transcodes that need to be done eventually but not necessarily now. :)
Today I learned the opposite of a WYSIWYG editor is an YAFIYGI editor.
WYSIWYG: A fully visual editor that renders a document or other output and allows you to modify it in situ. What You See Is What You Get.
YAFIYGI: A non-visual editor that uses some kind of markup language, e.g. LaTeX, HTML, or Markdown. It renders a document or other output when it's complete, and it's only then that you discover you made a massive mistake. You Asked For It, You Got It.
#TodayILearned about the Gen Z term "boy math," which is when the newly adult men of their generation make decisions about their adult lives based on attitudes they had during their long, overextended childhoods. Here, for example, the alarming trend among Gen Z men to invest their savings from their first corporate jobs not into stocks, bonds or real estate, but rather Pokemon cards.
#TodayILearned ... That the grandmother in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation was Mae Questel - the voice actor for both Betty Boop and Olive Oyl.
#TodayILearned that Art Nouveau architect Hector Guimard, who designed the iconic Paris Metro entrances known worldwide, has been virtually forgotten in his native France, after the country (like the rest of the Western world) became obsessed with boxy, sleek Mid-Century Modernism after World War Two.
