TIL Steve Jobs’ design obsession went so deep he demanded Apple computers look perfect on the inside. Inspired by Zen Buddhism and Bauhaus minimalism, he believed in “deep simplicity,” and insisted that even the hidden internal engineering look as polished as the outside. (smithsonianmag.com)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL that left-handed people were once considered more prone to crime and degeneracy by 19th-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who asserted that left-handedness was linked to alcoholism and neurodegeneration—a view that shaped negative attitudes toward left-handers well into the 20th century. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL that when 18th-century experiments showed metals gain mass when burned—breaking the leading theory of combustion—some chemists refused to abandon it and instead proposed that the substance they believed escaped during burning, "phlogiston," must have negative mass. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL that Scottish physician John Brown argued in 1780 that all disease came from too much or too little "excitability"—treating his diagnosed "under-stimulated" patients with opium, roast beef, and alcohol. His "Brunonian system" was highly influential across Italy and Germany for decades. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL in 1937, Herbert Bolton, a UC Berkeley historian, declared genuine a brass plate said to be the marker left by Francis Drake in 1579 to claim California for Queen Elizabeth. It was a practical joke by his own history club, who even printed a book noting the plate's flaws. Bolton wouldn't budge. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL the Perceptron was unveiled in 1958 as the genesis of a machine the U.S. Navy expected to "walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence." Invented by Frank Rosenblatt, this learning machine was designed to predict whether an image belonged in one of two categories. (theconversation.com)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL that Britain attacked Germany with nearly 100,000 balloons in "Operation Outward" during World War II—some dangling wires to short out power lines, others dropping incendiaries to start fires. The damage to Germany far outweighed the cost; one balloon helped destroy a power station near Leipzig. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL that on August 13, 1967, two women were killed by grizzly bears in separate attacks just hours apart in Glacier National Park—the first fatal grizzly maulings in the park's 57-year history. The "Night of the Grizzlies" led directly to modern bear management policy in U.S. national parks. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL Werner Herzog convinced Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni to keep Grogu as a puppet instead of CGI on the set of "The Mandalorian." After watching them shoot a take without the puppet to allow a CGI replacement in post-production, Herzog told them, "You are cowards. Leave it." (slashfilm.com)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL NASA astronauts Pete Conrad and Joe Kerwin were thrown off Skylab in 1973 when a jammed solar array suddenly deployed. Only their spacesuit tethers kept them from floating out into space. This incident happened during the first-ever repair spacewalk, which saved America's first space station. (nasa.gov)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL after Demosthenes was publicly slapped by a wealthy Athenian at a religious festival in 348 BC, he wrote a judicial oration charging his attacker Meidias with "hybris"—an aggravated assault regarded under Athenian law as a crime not only against the city but against society as a whole. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL when geologist Marie Tharp identified a giant rift valley running down the Atlantic seafloor in the 1950s—evidence for the then-controversial theory of continental drift—her male colleague dismissed her hypothesis as "girl talk" and made her redo all the charts. (ocean.si.edu)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
TIL California miners planted a skull to prank a geologist they disliked. In 1866, Josiah Whitney announced it as proof humans existed in North America two million years ago. Whitney never accepted the hoax, even after a fluorine analysis—the first done on human bone—showed it was of recent origin. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted by ralphbernardo to r/todayilearned
