Fun Facts or Use(less) Information
| Fact | Source |
|---|---|
| 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 The last Ugly Law wasn't rescinded in Chicago until 1974.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 |
| 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 |
| TIL in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” | Source |
| TIL that in the 1630s there was a song only played in the Sistine chapel. The Vatican kept the composition of “Miserere Mei, Deus” secret for 150 years,until 14-year old Mozart listened to it 2 times, transcribed it from memory and produced the first unauthorized copy.Earliest record of music piracy | Miserere_(Allegri) |
| If NASA had the US military's annual budget, what would it be capable of achieving? | nasa_with_us_military_budget |
| TIL that in “understand”, “under” means “to be part of” or “to be surrounded by” as for example when you say “under those circumstances”. So, to “understand” something, is to stand in the midst of it. And “explain” literally means to flatten, plain out X. So you can “be part of” or “be surrounded by” X once you “understand”. | |
| TIL Jamestown governor John Ratcliffe, the villain in “Pocahontas,” died horrifically in real life. After being tricked, ambushed & captured, women removed his skin with mussel shells and tossed the pieces into a fire as he watched. They skinned his face last, and burned him at the stake. | Source |
| TIL: Euler's work touched upon so many fields that in an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, many discoveries are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler. | List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler |
| TIL the king of Thailand, Rama X, whose birth name was Vajiralongkorn Borommachakkrayadisonsantatiwong Thewetthamrongsuboriban Aphikhunuprakanmahittaladunladet Phumiphonnaretwarangkun Kittisirisombunsawangkhawat Borommakhattiyaratchakuman | Source |