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Fun Facts or Use(less) Information
Fact | Source |
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TIL: Ancient Romans used a single hand to show numbers smaller than 100 and another hand to show greater than 100. And using both hands they could count up to 10,000 | |
TIL that cities used to have 'ugly laws.' People were fined $1 to $50 per day if they were deemed 'too ugly' to go out in public. The last Ugly Law wasn't rescinded in Chicago until 1974. | Source |
TIL Carl Benz's wife Bertha was the first motorist. In the summer of 1888 Bertha decided to “test drive” the second prototype Motorwagen on a journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim, a distance of more than 50 miles in a single day and left a note for Carl on the kitchen table | Source |
TIL that out at sea, a tsunami is only about a metre high, and could pass a boat without being noticed. As it approaches the shore, it’s the sudden deceleration from about 800km/h to 50km/h which creates the immense wave | Source |
TIL the Nigerian government has removed history from the secondary school curriculum as a result of the Nigerian civil war (the biafran war) being too controversial, where the Nigerian government blockaded and starved 3 million people to death. | Source |
TIL of the sunkin library book burning memorial in Berlin, Germany. The library is built underground, is not accessible to the public, and can only be viewed through a glass plate that shows enough empty bookcases to hold 20,000 books, the amount burned in a book burning event on May 10, 1933. | Source |