information:funfacts:funfacts

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Fun Facts or Use(less) Information

FactSource
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 The last Ugly Law wasn't rescinded in Chicago until 1974.Source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 tableSource
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 waveSource
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
TIL Everything in Prince's first album was made by himself. He sang all the parts and played all the 27 instruments, including the guitars, bass, synths, drums, windchimes, piano, clavinet, and even the bongos.Source


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