Things I learned lately 29 Dec

• Film historian Jeremy Arnold has declared that Die Hard is indeed a Christmas movie. Pfft. Of course it is. How can it not be?
• Glace cherries and maraschino cherries are not the same thing.
• William Phelps Eno (June 3, 1858 – December 3, 1945) was an American businessman responsible for many of the earliest innovations in road safety and traffic control. He is sometimes known as the "Father of traffic safety", despite never having learned to drive a car himself. Among the innovations credited to Eno are traffic regulations, the stop sign, the pedestrian crosswalk, the traffic circle, the one-way street, the taxi stand, and pedestrian safety islands.
• The first recorded use of a smiley on the internet came in 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed the use of :-) and :-( to distinguish between jokes and serious posts online. This was a response to a post on the Carnegie Mellon University bulletin board, where a student joked that there was a mercury spill in the physics department’s elevator. Other students missed context for the joke and thought a spill actually occurred. The smileys were slowly adopted throughout Carnegie Mellon and later to the broader internet.
• The mild bell pepper didn’t exist before the 1920s. It was developed in Szeged, Hungary.
• The top 3 countries that get the most average amount of sleep per night are The Netherlands, New Zealand, and France.
• The Chinese checkers game was invented in Germany.
• The flags of Bhutan and Wales are the only flags to contain dragons.
• Cyprus doesn’t have a national anthem.
• Damascus, the capital of Syria, is considered the oldest capital city, believed to exist since 9000 BC.