Today I learned

… yes they used cow gut/intestines 🐄🐄. 7 layers of cow gut where sewn onto a carrier layer of fabric to create an airtight balloon that could hold hydrogen lifting gas for some days 🎈. 50.000 cows where slaughtered for one gas-cell

Advantages over rubber of cow gut:

• rubber-cotton balloons got brittle with repeated uses with hydrogen filling. Cow gut is a flexible material that lasted longer, though expensive.
• rubber balloons can get statically charged. A small spark can flame all the hydrogen at once. Cattle gut does not charge as quickly as rubber.

Source:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbeater%27s_skin#Applications
• https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschl%C3%A4gerhaut german article mentions some more numbers data.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship#Envelope

@todayilearned Today I learned that Wernher von Braun (of Nazi Rocket Scientist infamy) wrote a sci-fi novel about Mars colonisation. In 1971 a South African racist named his son after the book's Martian Leader: Elon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project/_Mars:/_A/_Technical/_Tale#The_%22Elon%22

i know someone who is a native russian speaker and said they were “eating lunch” at 5pm despite already having eaten lunch. i was confused, and either figured they were having a second or late lunch, when i found this:

It's just another French word we fucked up.

"fraud, deception, humbug"

She killed Seabird on the new episode "Hope N' Mic Night".

That unusual therapy is all very well—or perhaps not—but its existence among some pre-Columbian peoples of the Western Hemisphere and some post-Columbian peoples of eighteenth-century Europe does little to explain why the slang expression "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" emerged only in the 1940s or later. My guess is that the historical practice is only coincidentally related to the modern expression.

But if the weird medical practice isn't the source of the slang term, what is? I suspect that the answer is amplification: sometimes a slang term that has been around for a while acquires new cachet thanks to a snappy word replacement or an edgier extension. But if this simply a case of amplification, a couple of other phenomena are likely: (1) we might see alternative extended versions of "blow smoke"—especially in the period before "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" comes into frequent use—that use less startling words than "ass"; and (2) we ought to see "blow smoke up [someone's] ass" being used not just for "blowing smoke" definition 2 above, but for definitions 1 and 3 as well.