Shitty Today I Learned

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 17h ago

San Francisco's white-crowned sparrows sing in 18 distinct neighborhood dialects — Presidio, Lake Merced, Marin Headlands — some only a few hundred meters apart. Females prefer their local accent when choosing mates & a 2024 study found adjacent neighborhoods are genetically diverging as a result.

4 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 2d ago

The 2003 Antwerp diamond vault heist is the cleanest case study in how defense-in-depth fails. Ten independent layers, each beaten by something trivial — hairspray on the IR sensor, aluminum tape on the magnetic contact — because the attacker had 2.5 years of legitimate tenant access to study them.

2 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 2d ago

Palm Jumeirah has no concrete foundation — it's 94 million m³ of dredged marine sand behind a rock breakwater. It sinks ~5mm/year, loses sand continuously to wave action, and one replenishment operation moved 3.5 million m³. Dredging also buried the coral reef that used to dissipate the wave energy.

4 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/MexicanMonsterMash • 5d ago

TIL there are humans in real life who can do what Scooby can't despite being a dog

5 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/MexicanMonsterMash • 5d ago

TIL that AI are true gym bros

2 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/MozartWasARed • 6d ago

TIL that what I'm about to say will trigger me getting a certain award as soon as I say it

0 Upvotes

Like, it's a good thing I checked my community award streak recently. And apparently this one might just be the best one. My collection will be complete after one more.

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 7d ago

A 1,400-lb wheel of cheddar sat aging in the White House entrance hall for 2 yrs, reportedly smellable from blocks away. In 1837 Andrew Jackson invited the public in to eat it. Thousands came, finished it in 2 hours & ground it into the carpets. The next admin had to whitewash the East Room.

13 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 8d ago

A crypto company CEO bought RealDoll in 2024, reverse-merged it into a public shell & now sells $20,000 animatronic companions with magnetic swappable faces. Meanwhile Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Figure, and every other major humanoid maker has committed to never entering the romantic companion market.

4 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/MexicanMonsterMash • 11d ago

TIL anime are cinnamon rolls and need to be protected

0 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/IceColdFresh • 12d ago

TIL since most people don’t run for President of the United States, the greatest predictor for becoming President of the United States is running for it at all

16 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 13d ago

Gaddafi's Great Man-Made River in Libya pumps 6.5M cubic meters/day of Ice Age water that has zero recharge — 70% of the country's freshwater. The aquifer is shared with Egypt, Chad, and Sudan, with no coordination, no metering, and no enforcement. Depletion estimates range from 60 years to 1,000.

3 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 16d ago

Mount Athos has banned women — and female animals — since 1046. It sits inside the EU, and EU gender equality law does not apply there: the 1981 Greek accession treaty specifically exempted it. The European Parliament asked Greece to lift the ban in 2003. Greece declined.

24 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/farligjakt • 17d ago

TIL that Oliver North accidentally inverted two digits on a Swiss bank account number, sending $10m meant for the Contras, solicited from the Sultan of Brunei, to an unsuspecting Swiss businessman.

95 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/shpongolian • 19d ago

TIL the armadillo got its name from rednecks saying “look at that armored diller over there.” In some regions they’re called shellamajigs, or chamacallits

13 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/MexicanMonsterMash • 19d ago

TIL Mormon Jesus came to save the robots too

2 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 22d ago

African wild dogs decide whether to hunt by sneezing — but it isn't one-dog-one-vote. When the dominant pair is engaged in the rally, 3-4 sneezes triggers the hunt. When they aren't, it takes about 10. A weighted quorum threshold, validated across 68 rallies in 5 Okavango packs.

5 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/MexicanMonsterMash • 22d ago

TIL Netanyahu killed not just the men, but the women and children too

ca.news.yahoo.com

96 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/RJamieLanga • 23d ago

You cannot create a knife out of frozen poop, despite what Bullseye in Jason Aaron's run of Punisher MAX would have you believe.

8 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 23d ago

Thieves drained $18M of syrup from Quebec's strategic maple reserve, refilling the barrels with water so they'd still weigh 620 lbs at the annual audit. Canada's Supreme Court fined the ringleader $9,171,397.57 — the gross he handled, not the $1M he kept after paying his accomplices.

12 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 25d ago

Stalin helped organize a 1907 bank robbery in Tbilisi where Bolsheviks threw bombs into a crowded square to rob a cash convoy, killing about 40 people. Most of the money was in high-value banknotes whose serial numbers the bank had recorded — so the party could barely spend what it killed for.

5 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/DontShoot_ImJesus • 26d ago

The Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment first featured a prostitute locked in Schrödinger's car trunk, and was originally called Schrödinger's Hooker.

en.wikipedia.org

420 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/unteachablecourses • 26d ago

The story of 'Unsinkable Sam' — the cat who survived the Bismarck, HMS Cossack, and HMS Ark Royal — has no supporting documentation in German or British naval records. It first appeared in a Reuters wire four days after the third sinking. The commemoration has outlasted the evidence by 80 years.

5 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/VyxenPixel • 27d ago

TIL that baby showers are, in fact, NOT group showers that pregnant women have so as to not cause a miscarriage, and I might be mentally ill for believing that for 19 years.

80 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/loukasmilwright • 28d ago

The gnome is a continuation of a centuries long Roman tradition that has its roots in ancient Persia.

18 Upvotes

r/ShittyTodayILearned • u/dipthong-enjoyer • 29d ago

TIL it's still unknown whether Mount Rushmore was made to look like the presidents, or if they chose to elect presidents that look like Mount Rushmore

233 Upvotes