🐬 TIL: A dolphin named Kelly figured out how to run a scam on her trainers.

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, dolphins got a fish for every piece of trash they turned in. Kelly noticed the payout was the same no matter the size, so she hid trash under a rock and tore off small pieces to redeem one at a time.

Then she escalated. Turning in a stray seagull earned a bonus fish payout, so Kelly started saving one of her fish, using it as bait to lure gulls, and cashing in the bigger reward. She later taught the trick to her calf, and it spread through the pod until gull-baiting was, in the words of one account, a hot game among the dolphins.

Trainers only found her stash when they drained the pool for repairs and discovered a pile of garbage hidden under the rocks. Kelly survived Hurricane Katrina and was relocated to the Bahamas, where she was still going strong in her 40s as of 2018.

Read more:
theguardian.com/science/2003/j…
hakaimagazine.com/features/kel…

#TIL #dolphins #AnimalIntelligence

Why dolphins are deep thinkers

The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be, writes Anuschka de Rohan

^{Guardian staff reporter (The Guardian)}

Used #books need a new categorisation. It's not only important how well preserved they are, but – #TIL – whether they're reasonably clean or filthy.

This is the first time in my life that I used kitchen surface cleaner on a book before I opened it.

TIL that Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha, with whom he had 6 children, and Sally Hemings, the slave with whom Jefferson also fathered 6 children, were half siblings; they had the same father. Therefore, they were aunts to each other's children.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J…
#til #todayilearned
reddit.com/r/todayilearned/com…

TIL Tron (1982) was considered ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects because “the Academy thought we cheated by using computers.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron
#til #todayilearned
reddit.com/r/todayilearned/com…

🚗 TIL: Before GPS was fully operational, Honda built a car navigation system that used zero satellites.

In 1981, the Honda Electro Gyrocator debuted as a dealer option on the Accord. You placed a transparent plastic map over a small CRT screen and marked your starting point.

As you drove, a helium gas-rate gyroscope detected turns: helium flow shifted between two heated wires, creating a temperature difference the computer read as direction. A transmission sensor tracked distance. A 16-bit computer combined both to move a dot across the map showing your position.

Not perfect. Wheel spin and drift compounded, so you could pull over and manually realign. The IEEE designated it a Milestone in 2017 as the world's first map-based car navigation system, 14 years before GPS.

The catch: it cost about $2,746 (nearly a quarter of the car's price). It only lasted one year.

Read more:
spectrum.ieee.org/first-mapbas…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_…
global.honda/en/heritage/episo…

#TIL #Honda #engineering #history

First Map-Based Car Navigation System Debuted 14 Years Before GPS

Released in 1981, Honda’s Electro Gyrocator is now an IEEE Milestone

^{Ivan Berger (IEEE Spectrum)}

TIL that James Doohan, along with producer John Povill, devised the basic sounds and handful of words used for the Klingon language in the first Star Trek film. Doohan recorded the lines he invented onto a tape, which were used by the actors to learn.

More well-known is that Paramount brought in linguist Mark Okrand to create a fully-fledged written and verbal language for Star Trek III based on Doohan’s work, which is the most widely used fictional language on earth.

#startrek #til

TIL that US hops production is heavily concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. Washington, Oregon, and Idaho account for 99% of all US production. Yakima Valley, WA alone accounts for 75% of domestic hops. If you had a beer with American hops it likely came from this region ,"The Hops Belt".

worldpopulationreview.com/stat…
#til #todayilearned
reddit.com/r/todayilearned/com…

TIL the ingredient that turns cheese into Nacho cheese is called sodium citrate. This contains Sodium (Na), Carbon (C), Hydrogen (H) and Oxygen (O). Thus, the formula for nacho cheese is NaCHO.

mashed.com/770182/youve-probab…
#til #todayilearned
reddit.com/r/todayilearned/com…

TIL a 9-year-old girl researched the decibel levels of public hand dryers after noticing her ears were ringing after using one. Nearly 4 years later, her research was accepted into the Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health, and Dyson planned to have her meet with an acoustic engineer.

abcnews.com/GMA/Wellness/13-ye…
#til #todayilearned
reddit.com/r/todayilearned/com…