12 Trivia Tidbits for Monday, July 29, 2024
The Olympics used to be so much more accessible. Let’s bring back lethargy — and sloth-based events!
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Emotional Support Airport Llamas
Portland Airport employs a pair of adorable llamas with bows in their tails, which they bring out to ease tensions during particuarly tough travel days, like the recent CrowdStrike outage.
Who Could Have Guessed? A.I. Echo Chambers Don’t Work
A.I. training models are already running out of content made by actual humans, so they’ve begun A.I.-generating data to train A.I. on. Predictably, studies are now showing that those incestuous training models “can collapse” when there’s too much synthetic data.
A Red Lobster Kitchen Employee Saved an Extremely Rare Lobster
A dishwasher at a Colorado Red Lobster spotted an orange lobster, which only comes around about once every 30 million lobsters, and donated it to a local aquarium.
Mapping Out the Placebo Effect
Scientists have tracked down the specific neural activity that fires up when a person experiences the placebo effect, the process wherein the brain essentially heals the body because it believes it has ingested a cure for an ailment. Could Wolverine-esque healing abilities be on the way?
Milk-Based Sponges That Mine Gold From Computers
A sustainable sponge made from a dairy byproduct has been found to be effective in combing gold particles out of old computer parts.
The Most Boring Olympic Competition in History
Distance Plunging was a weird sport that peaked in popularity at the 1904 Olympics, despite being criticized as “not an athletic event at all.” Competitors would dive into the water, and then not move a single muscle, attempting to glide the furthest over the course of 60 seconds. The current world record is 86 feet 5 inches, set in 1933.
Calvin Coolidge’s VP Wrote a Hit Song
Charles Dawes had several careers before becoming Coolidge’s (deeply hated) vice president. He dabbled in music for a while, and after he’d moved on to banking, his 1912 piano tune “Melody in A Major” became super popular. Decades later, other musicians started messing around with it, and Tommy Edwards hit the number one spot with a rock ‘n’ roll version in 1958.
Komodo Dragons’ Mouths Just Got Weirder
Their bite delivers a neurotoxin and an anticoagulant agent, making it one of the least enjoyable bites in the animal kingdom. Until a recent study, the fact that their teeth are also tipped in iron somehow escaped notice by researchers.
We’re Watching an Isolated Tribe Being Driven Out of the Forest by Loggers in Real Time
Videos are emerging of the Mashco Piro tribe, the largest Indigenous community in the world, fleeing to the banks of a river in the Amazon as logging companies move into territory they were recently granted by the Peruvian government.
A Refrigerated Art Installation
Artist Josh Kline made a series of bottled smoothie-looking art pieces by blending up different items that represent a consumerist lifestyle. Some of them look surprisingly appetizing, but others look like straight-up diarrhea. The “BIg Data” is a murky sludge made up of Google Glass, underwear, a Verizon bill, Purell and pornography.
Global Warming Is Making Days Drag on Longer
As the polar ice caps melt and water gathers at the equator, the Earth has begun spinning slightly slower. 1.33 miliseconds per century sounds like nothing, but it could mess up highly sensitive GPS and satellite math.
Ice Cream Consumption Doesn’t Peak in the Summer
An Instacart data analysis found that vanilla is America’s favorite ice cream flavor, appearing in 29 percent of all orders year round. While demand is high in the summer, its two highest peaks are right before Thanksgiving and Christmas, two top-tier pie holidays.
