Today I learned about Marion Stokes' TV archive

Today I learned about Marion Stokes, a woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who recorded hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012. At her death, she had grown a collection of about 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes. Her archivist and compulsive hoarding tendency also resulted in a collection of 30,000 to 40,000 books.

In 2019, a documentary film was made about her, and her archives named Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.

Her collection was archived by the Internet Archive which is available here.

Today I Learned: All coal was created around the same time

There is an ongoing debate on whether almost all coal was made around the same time, during a brief period 360 to 300 million years ago.

Photo by Nikolay Kovalenko on Unsplash

We are using the coal that was created during this period and almost no new coal has formed since then.

Steve Mould provides an easy-to-understand explanation in this video on YouTube.

The Elk Valley Coal News has a detailed article on this here.

Today I Learned about the Peter principle

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. Read more.

Today I Learned: Voyager 1 is almost 15 billion miles away from Earth and still can communicate

Today I Learned: Voyager 1 space probe is almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth and still can communicate with the ground antennas of the Deep Space Network (DSN).

The DSN antennas are located at Goldstone, near Barstow, California; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. [Source]

Today I learned that Kopi Luwak is made from partially digested coffee beans

Today I learned that Kopi Luwak - which is the most expensive coffee - is made from coffee beans which have been eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet (or Indonesian palm civet). [Wikipedia]

Photo by ray sangga kusuma on Unsplash

Kopi Luwak is not really a type of coffee beans but rather a type of production process.

Kopi Luwak is one of the most expensive coffees in the world with prices going up to $700 per kilogram in the US. An 8.8 oz pack of Wallacea Coffee's Wild Luwak Coffee is retailing on Amazon.com for $39.99 today, January 08, 2020.

Today I learned about a place named Hindustan in Indiana

So, some time ago we were driving through Indiana along the Old State Road 37 and we were surprised to see that we were passing a place named Hindustan. 😯 Later I look up Wikipedia and it says that: Hindustan is an unincorporated community in Washington Township, Monroe County, in the U.S. state of Indiana.

While digging all that, next I discover that there's also a place called Hindostan (mark the spelling; on Wikipedia) in Indiana which is an unincorporated community in Northwest Township, Orange County, in the U.S. state of Indiana.

Quite a few surprises in a single day.

Today I learned about the Gulf Rupee

Today I learned that the Gulf Rupee, which was issued by the Government of India and the Reserve Bank of India, was the official currency between 1959 and 1966 of the areas that today form the countries of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. It was initially pegged at par with the Indian rupee. A Wikipedia page on this is here. The Reference site for Islamic Bank Notes writes about it here.

Today I Learned that Costco's hot dog has remained $1.50 since it was first introduced in 1984

Incredibly, the hot dog and soda combo at Costco has sold for the same $1.50 since the retail club first introduced the dogs to customers in 1984. Accounting for inflation, it should sell for about $4.25.

MentalFloss writes about it here: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/547020/costco-150-hot-dog-soda-combo-enigma

Today I Learned: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have under 70 kilobytes of memory each

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Today I Learned: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes have only 69.63 kilobytes of memory each. For comparison, a mobile phone with 16 gigabytes of memory has about 240,000 times the memory of a Voyager spacecraft. Source