This symbol first showed up in the 1770s, appearing in documents of English-Americans who had business dealings with Spanish-Americans. However, it wasn’t until the very early 1800s that it became popularized, around the same time as the first official U.S. dollars were being minted. Previous to this, the symbol had already been in use as an abbreviation for names of Spanish currency, namely as an abbreviation for the Spanish peso “p”. Read more…
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Where the Dollar Sign Comes From
OneDrive just more than doubled its free-storage offering, bringing it up to 15GB . That’s the same amount you’ll get with Google Drive. On top of that, all versions of Office 365 now come with a full 1TB of storage attached. That’s a lot of spreadsheets. Read more…
On Monday, the internet was all kinds of excited over the fact that hundreds of new emoji were soon to arrive . Now, the Unicode Consortium has published a chart which shows us what they’ll actually look like. Read more…
At 2, 165 feet, Shenzhen’s Ping An Finance Center is about to become the tallest building in China and the second-tallest in the world. And it’s getting there very quickly: According to a new report from DesignBoom , workers are finishing a new floor of the 115-story building every four days . Read more…
It sounds weird, but the most abundant mineral on Earth finally got a name last week, thanks to a century-old meteorite. What? How? Why did it take so long? There were a whole confluence of reasons it took bridgmanite so long to get its name. Read more…
Feedly and Evernote are experiencing DDoS attacks and may be inaccessible to users. The alleged perpetrator is asking for “ransom” to cease the attacks. Read more here . Read more…
In the early hours of June 4th, the New York Police Department raided the General Ulysses S. Grant and Manhattanville housing projects in West Harlem. Its biggest gang raid ever, it saw 40 suspects arrested—and it was masterminded by mining over 1 million Facebook posts. Read more…
Every ounce counts when you’re hoisting several hundred tons of steel into the air and flying it across an ocean. So does every second flight attendants spend waiting on the people inside. Those ounces and seconds add up—and that’s why Virgin Atlantic spent $168 million on a transformative redesign of its meal trays. Read more…