There's a new application-layer Internet protocol like (but also very much unlike) http by the name of Gemini. It was first launched in 2019 and until yesterday, flew completely under my radar. It's primarily meant to be used for uncluttered text-only pages (although any type of file can be distributed), which are created using a deliberately simple and limited markdown language. Unsurprisingly, this results in a plethora of small niche blogs being published through it.

The basic user experience is essentially the same as browsing the web, until you notice just how much it isn't. You enter URLs (except that they start with gemini://) you read texts and you click on hyperlinks - except that every page looks exactly the same due to the markdown language. There are no pop-ups, no ads, nothing autoplays, nothing wants your consent to exploit your user data. Even images only load when the user clicks on them. It shows just how little is actually needed, how many aspects of the modern web are completely unnecessary and mere pointless distractions.

Gemini pages - and this is a small hurdle that will keep most people away from it - can not be accessed with a normal web browser and instead require a specialized client for viewing (although paradoxically, creating pages often requires a web browser, at least for now). The idea is that both the underlying tech and the browsers are much more straightforward than anything related to http and html. A Gemini client is not effectively an entire operating system of its own that can execute near arbitrary code. It displays formatted text with basic images and videos - that's it.

Here's a neat, but slightly outdated introduction that also recommends a few clients and where to find pages to read:

https://geminiquickst.art/

The entire thing feels very early, tiny, experimental and odd, almost like a parallel reality, as if the World Wide Web didn't exist and someone came up with something like it only now, using today's hard- and software. If Lemmy is a response to social media in general and reddit in particular, Gemini feels more like a response to the World Wide Web as a whole or like a time machine back to a highly idealized version of the early days of the information system (the primary difference being the lack of horrendous '90s UX design and malware everywhere), including some unfortunate aspects that I had long forgotten about, like how the common method of finding content next to feeds - manually updated indexes instead of search engines - is plagued by dead links; and these dead links, unlike on the normal Internet, cannot be attempted to be resolved using the Wayback Machine or some other cache, at least not yet.

Gemini is equally parts exciting and promising, like a new frontier, but also at times confusing and frustrating. Don't expect your Gemini client of choice to replace your web browser any time soon (or ever), but it's still worth trying out, if for the novelty alone.

Ferrero (the company that owns Kinder, Nutella and Ferrero Rocher) controlled one quarter of the global production of hazelnuts in 2014.

(Edited to remove some unintentionally deceptive language)

Major sporting events are a popular time for men to schedule a vasectomy because they're advised to take it easy for two to three days after the procedure. For most men, this means sitting on the couch in front of their television, and sporting events offer them something to watch while resting.
https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/why-more-men-get-vasectomies-during-march-madness

NSA spends $250 million per year to insert backdoors in software and hardware

Sources:

• https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html
• https://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption

Traffic (the book) says most Americans merge into traffic wrong when lanes reduce (from say 3 lanes to 2 lanes for example.)

The right way is waiting until you are at the very end of the lane that's reducing. When that happens up to 60% more cars per hour get through the bottle neck in heavy traffic and accidents resulting in killed or serious injury are reduced by up to 80%.

Bottom line having multiple entry points in a queue with multiple slow down points due to the multiple entry points is the cause of the reduced performance with the way most Americans do it.

Australia has the largest feral camel population.

A rat, a cat, a dog, a person, a human, a horse and an elephant all piss with a full bladder,

Who finishes first?

Weirdly enough, according to science, it's the same time for every mammal to urinate (except really small ones like mice because liquid dynamics starts behaving differently, surface tension etc).

https://www.theverge.com/2013/10/19/4855076/the-law-of-urination-mammals-take-21-seconds-to-pee

Earlier today I learned the voice of Shredder from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince. I never knew.

Hummingbirds eat mosquitoes.

The word "asteroid" literally means "star-like", because when they were first observed, no telescope could see enough detail to know what they were, so they were basically just called "those things that look a bit like stars".

Even when eventually we figured out what they were, they were generally considered to all be spherical like tiny planets (see: The Little Prince) until the 1970s when one of the Mars probes flew close enough to have a look at one.

Otters hold hands while sleeping so they don't drift away from each other!

Did you know the infinity sign is called a lemniscate?

Reagan made it legal to use cartoons to sell toys by deregulating marketing to children, according to the recent Wizard and the Bruiser episode

Watching historical stuff on youtube (I download and watch during my commute), today I learned how the Portuguese managed to get a very firm hold on the western coast of India in the early 1500s. The TLDR version is that they managed to get the cities that were vassals of Calicut under their wing, and even managed to fight off a massive siege the raja of Calicut sent to destroy their small garrison at Kochin in 1504: a 50k strong force was beaten by a garrison of 90 Portuguese soldiers + ~200 local Nayar warriors + 3 Portuguese ships (1 carrack and 2 caravels).

Before it got to that part, I also learned that Vasco da Gama, who led the initial demands on Calicut, was a short tempered psycopath and violent maniac hell bent on teaching "those muslims" a lesson.

All mammals with a full bladder pee for precisely 21 seconds. Legit universal rule.

baltic sea is the youngest ocean of the planet.

Ball jars are made by Newell Brands. Ball makes spaceships now instead

When a quantum wave function decoheres, it doesn't precisely collapse into a singular state. Instead, it transitions into a more restricted superposition that resonates with the environmental conditions, effectively integrating into a more intricate quantum system.

This implies that not only individual particles are in a state of superposition, but the entire universe exists in such a state. However, this superposition is so extensively constrained by interactions and entanglements that, at a macroscopic scale, the universe behaves according to classical mechanics.

ELI5: Imagine the universe is like a giant game of pretend where everything can be in many stories at once—like a cat being both awake and asleep in its adventure, or a ball that’s both rolling and still. But, as soon as we peek to see what’s happening in the game, everything picks one story to stick to where the cat is either just awake or just asleep, and the ball is either rolling or not. But, the game is so big and involves so many things that, most of the time, it seems like everything is following simple rules, like in a regular game, even though underneath, it’s still playing pretend with all the possibilities.

Monotremes don't have stomachs. They got a weird tubey thing.

25% of men's hair will thin before 21

80% by 50