Today I Learned

TIL

• of Arfa Karim, the prodigy who became the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in 2004 at the age of nine. She passed away in 2012, aged 16.

TIL

• that in JavaScript you can convert characters to their non-accented versions by just doing str.normalize("NFD").replace(/[\u0300-\u036f]/g, "");
• that China bans time travel on TV, saying it “disrespects history”

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• Laravel has a memory leak that keeps increasing memory during tests and eventually causes an “Out of Memory” error for large enough test bases

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• that there’s a lizard named the Jesus Christ Lizard due to its ability to run on water

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• that any working phone, whether in service or not, will dial 911
• that yawning is visually contagious
• that putting batteries in a fridge doubles their lifespan
• that my heart doesn’t stop when I sneeze (my life’s been a lie)

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• that you can play the dino game in Chrome by typing about:dino into the address bar
• to use Babel Root Import plugin to use import with root based paths

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• that the rows of dots that connect column in a table or an index (e.g. Chapter 1 . . . . . Page 3) are called “dot leaders”

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• that the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong was developed to work on systems with 4,096 bytes of memory and 128 bytes of RAM
• that Scorpions’ White Dove is a cover of Omega’s Gyöngyhajú lány

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• that the word “animal” has its root as Latin’s anima (“breath, spririt”)
• of animism, the belief that every place, every animal, every plant, and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can communicate directly with humans

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• that BBC has a pidgin version
• that after calling Carbon::setTestNow($mockDate) you should call Carbon::setTestNow() again (without arguments) to reset to the normal behavior and not affect other tests