TIL that if you get a bat colony in humid air and a limestone cave, the collective exhaled CO2 forms enough carbonic acid to actually enlarge the cave by eating away at the stone
TIL I was extraordinarily angry and mean as a teenager because I was out of spoons all the time. I was never given the opportunity to recharge, never given time alone or quiet down time or a day that wasn’t scheduled with social interactions, and I never had the energy to have a good mood until I was 21 years old and living alone for the first time. Loud music drowning everything else out was as close as I got to quiet or alone in my childhood home, and I have a lot of hearing loss from blasting music constantly.
I learned that the Tufted Pygmy Squirrel exists and I just. Oh dear. I can't stop laughing it's like a five year old drew a critter with no regards to proportion or realism. Spoiler: Doot I love him.
I learned that the phrase “to knuckle down” comes from the position you take if you’re tryharding in a game of marbles and really wanna go for it: knuckles on the ground, eye-level low to judge your marble’s trajectory. I always assumed it was something to do with making bread!
TIL that the upper case C and the lower case s in the font Comic Sans have serifs. Also that Kintsugi doesn't have Comic Sans as a font option.
What the heck I just tested that and confirmed, how have I never noticed that before? Why is it only mostly sans serif...?
It is indeed the worst font. The fact that it is only the upper case C and the lower case s might be because the font should be spelled "Comic sans", or perhaps even "ComiC sans", to really drive the point home.
cries in UT fan It's used to the point of instant recognition, which - like with Papyrus/Parchment - gives it a certain reputation beyond what just the look of it gives. But I know it's useful for readability, and on most devices, so it serves a function. ComiC sans would be an incredible way to showcase it tbh
I'd rate it the best font for the inconsistent serifs, except it's not "random letters get serifs because the designer hates you", so I can't give it points for that, and it's not "serifs for the initials of the font name" unless you do the particular case choice of Comic sans, and also one could reasonably argue that the lowercase r also has a serif, but one could also argue that the lowercase r just has particularly curvy arm. If it turns out that having serifs on only the uppercase C and the lowercase s somehow made the font optimally readable, I'd be disappointed but wouldn't protest, except I find that highly unlikely.
So Comic sans has "serifs" on uppercase I and J, except the serifs are large enough that I'm not sure they count as serifs anymore. It's more like how some people write a dash through their "7"s to distinguish them from "1"s. Like, for Times New Roman they're definitely serifs, as they taper off at the ends, but for Comic sans they don't taper at all. The uppercase I is basically a T with an underline.
There's an alternative to Braille called Moon, which is supposedly easier for people who lost their sight as adults to learn. I might give learning both a go, just out of curiosity.
TIL that the Chernobyl radiation-eating fungus might be usable as radiation-shielding for space exploration. They brought some of the fungus up to the International Space Station and initial experiments have been promising. Paper Like, Chernobyl was a disaster, but this is a pretty cool thing that we might not have discovered for a very long time otherwise.
