TIL that Captain America was invented in December 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor and America's entrance into World War II. I think I had heard that Simon and Kirby got flack from pro-Hitler groups but I guess I hadn't put together that once the US was part of the war, pro-Hitler sentiment would have gotten suppressed, and hence the anti-Captain America stuff must have been before that.
TIL that modern versions of dd have a --status=progress flag that shows you progress and data rate every second.
Oh yeah, it’s still out there. We get occasional cases in the States. My mom used to tell me not to go near the prairie dog fields when visiting relatives because prairie dogs have been hit hard by the plague. Sometimes people contract it and very occasionally they die, but it’s treated with antibiotics. I had no idea there was such a problem in Madagascar.
TIL that BBC banned The Monster Mash when it was released in 1962, on the grounds of it being “too morbid.”
TIL that the cast-on I've been using since I started knitting is...the most basic one, intended for absolute beginners to get started with, and probably not really intended for use in...most of the projects I've done. (It also explains why my cast-ons have been a lot stretchier than seemed right.) I also learned how to do a knit cast-on and a long tail cast-on, and the cast-on behaves so much better when it's done as more than just a slipknot and a set of loops.
Okay, so - the cast-on I've been using for about five or six years, since I started knitting, is the 'super basic' one. Literally just a slipknot and then creating loops of yarn and putting them on the needle to get however many stitches you need to start out with. It turns out that a knit cast-on is just a little bit different, in that you make a slipknot and put it on the needle, then knit through the slipknot and put that stitch onto the needle, and then knit through the new stitch and put that stitch onto the needle, and so on until you have however many stitches you need. And a long tail cast-on uses both the tail and the working yarn to create stitches, although I don't know if I can actually properly explain how you do that; there's some good tutorials on youtube, though. But the 'slipknot and loops' method creates a very loose sort of cast-on - I needed to be really careful with tension, so that I didn't end up with enough loose yarn that I was at risk of creating more stitches if I wasn't careful, and I usually coped with it by making an absurdly short tail so that I could redo the slipknot at the end and dump the excess yarn there. With the knit cast-on and the long tail cast-on? That problem doesn't happen.
today I learned that malabrigo is probably one of the most recognizable dyed yarns out there, even sans tags and a. knitted up into some random shit, b. in a weirdly shaped ball, or c. poking out of a backpack, half-knitted, with double points sticking out of it everywhere
my friend just showed me in-person and taught me how to do a long tail method and my life is forever changed
today i learned... ok, i knew that the first exoplanets found were not the ones around 51 Pegasus, but instead were found orbiting a neutron star. but today i learned that that neutron star was named "Lich." and that the planets found have been named "Poltergeist," "Phobetor," and "Draugr." i love it. (x)
TIL that sodium citrate is amazing. Add a little to simmering water or milk, and you can just melt cheese straight into it, for perfect cheese sauce that just doesn't break. TIalsoL that Mac and cheese is the whitest food in existence.
That spirulina powder tastes really, really, really, really bad. Maybe I shouldn't try to cheat to get my greens.
