Today I Learned

"The inch-long larva is generously coated in long, luxuriant hair-like setae, making it resemble a tiny Persian cat, the characteristic that presumably gave it the name "puss". It is variable in color, from downy grayish white to golden brown to dark charcoal gray. It often has a streak of bright orange running longitudinally. The "fur" on early-stage larvae is sometimes extremely curly, giving them a cottony, puffed-up look. The body tapers to a tail that extends well beyond the body, unlike its relative M. crispata.[4] The middle instar has a more disheveled, "bad-hair-day" appearance, without a distinctive tail. The "fur" of the larva contains venomous spines that cause extremely painful reactions in human skin upon contact. The adult moth is covered in long fur in colors ranging from dull orange to lemon yellow, with hairy legs and fuzzy black feet. " - wikipedia

"In 1876, at the age of 27, she desired to marry an older lawyer who was not to her mother's liking; she argued that her daughter could not marry a "penniless lawyer".[4] Her disapproving mother, angered by her daughter's defiance, locked her in a tiny, dark room in the attic of their home, where she kept her secluded for 25 years. Louise and Marcel continued on with their daily lives, pretending to mourn Blanche's disappearance.

On 23 May 1901, the "Paris Attorney General"[b] received an anonymous letter, the author of which is still unknown, that revealed the incarceration:

"Monsieur Attorney General: I have the honour to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier's house, half-starved and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years – in a word, in her own filth."

Monnier was rescued by police from appalling conditions, covered in old food and feces, with bugs all around the bed and floor, weighing barely 25 kilograms (55 lb).

One policeman described the state of Monnier and her bed thus:

The unfortunate woman was lying completely naked on a rotten straw mattress. All around her was formed a sort of crust made from excrement, fragments of meat, vegetables, fish and rotten bread... We also saw oyster shells, and bugs running across Mademoiselle Monnier's bed. The air was so unbreathable, the odor given off by the room was so rank, that it was impossible for us to stay any longer to proceed with our investigation."

Her mother was arrested, became ill shortly afterwards and died 15 days later after seeing an angry mob gather in front of her house. Her brother, Marcel Monnier, appeared in court and was initially convicted, but later was acquitted on appeal; he was deemed mentally incapacitated, and, although the judges criticised his choices, they found that a "duty to rescue" did not exist in the penal code at that time with sufficient rule to convict him.[5][7]

After she was released from the room, Monnier continued to have mental health problems. She was diagnosed with various disorders, including anorexia nervosa,[c] schizophrenia, exhibitionism and coprophilia. This soon led to her admission to a psychiatric hospital in Blois, where she died on October 13, 1913, in apparent obscurity." - Wikipedia

The suit alleged Google, Apple Intel and Adobe agreed not to recruit each others employees in order to drive down wages.

The state of California is considering giving the descendants of slaves $1.2m each.

The CIA developed several guises to throw money at young, burgeoning writers, creating a cultural propaganda strategy with literary outposts around the world, from Lebanon to Uganda, India to Latin America. The same agency that occasionally undermined democracies for the sake of fighting Communism also launched the Congress for Cultural Freedoms (CCF). The CCF built editorial strategies for each of these literary outposts, allowing them to control the conversation in countries where readers might otherwise resist the American perspective.

Christmas in the Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album is a record album produced in 1980 by RSO Records. It features recordings of Star Wars-themed Christmas songs and stories about a droid factory where the robots make toys year-round for "S. Claus". Much of the album is sung and narrated by British actor Anthony Daniels, reprising his role as C-3PO from the Star Wars films, and written by composer-lyricist Maury Yeston. Sound designer Ben Burtt also provided sound effects for R2-D2 and Chewbacca. Production The album was produced by Meco Monardo (who had previously recorded Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk), with the hope that this would be the first in a series of annual Star Wars Christmas albums. The title, the story, and the majority of the album's original songs, both music and lyrics, were written by Yeston, then a Yale University music professor who went on to become the twice Tony...

When corporate entities infiltrate decentralized networks/platforms, they do it methodically with the intent to harm the decentralized platform in order to maintain the corporate monopoly.

#Kbin update:

- The https://kbin.social server is now federating with the Fediverse. You can follow/interact with kbin.social magazines & users from other Kbin servers, Mastodon & rest of the Fediverse. For example the TIL magazine is at @TodayILearned, the lead dev of Kbin is at @ernest

- There's a new Kbin server at https://readit.buzz which is run by the same people as the Universodon.com Mastodon server. It's open for signups, just click "log in" and then "register".

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small No

During the early hours of 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died from injuries sustained earlier that night in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France. Diana's partner, Dodi Fayed, and the driver of the Mercedes-Benz W140, Henri Paul, also died upon impact. Diana's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured, but was the only survivor of the crash. Some media claimed that the erratic behaviour of the paparazzi chasing the car, as reported by the BBC, caused the crash. In 1999, a French investigation found that Paul lost control of the vehicle at high speed while intoxicated by alcohol and under the effects of prescription drugs, and concluded that he was solely responsible for the crash. He was the deputy head of security at the Hôtel Ritz Paris and had earlier goaded paparazzi waiting for Diana and Fayed outside the hotel. Anti-depressants and traces of an anti-psychotic in his blood might have worsened Paul's inebriation...

The suit alleged Google, Apple Intel and Adobe agreed not to recruit each others employees in order to drive down wages.

The third man factor or third man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence, such as a spirit, provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences. History Sir Ernest Shackleton, in his 1919 book South, described his belief that an incorporeal companion joined him and his men during the final leg of his 1914–1917 Antarctic expedition, which became stranded in pack ice for more than two years and endured immense hardships in the attempt to reach safety. Shackleton wrote, "during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three". His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward and sharing similar experiences. Lines 359 through 365 of T. S. Eliot's 1922 modernist poem The Waste Land were inspired by Shackleton...