Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 21:49

TIL that American military pilot call signs--nicknames the pilots go by--are often based on mistakes the pilot made, and get assigned early in their career. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 20:49

TIL that Billy Mitchell sued Cartoon Network for infringing his likeness with the Regular Show character GBF, a giant floating head who cheats at arcade games. Mitchell's lawsuit was dismissed, in part because "when GBF loses his title, the character literally explodes, unlike Plaintiff". [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 19:49

TIL about "salad stacking," a fad where Chinese Pizza Hut customers built towering salads to bypass the "one trip, one bowl" rule, even sharing tips to maximize height. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 18:49

TIL in 1877 Egyptian Government gifted a gigantic 3500 year old obelisk to the US and it took teams of engineers years to remove, ship, transport over land, and erect in Central Park [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 15:49

TIL Miami Beach used to be an overwhelmingly Jewish community [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 13:49

TIL there are over 3.7 million ways to scramble a 2x2 Rubik’s cube [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 11:49

TIL that Nintendo made an adapter for Game Boy Color that allowed it to be tethered to a cellphone for internet, email, and online Pokemon [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 06:49

TIL at least 60% of english words come from latin directly or indirectly(from old french). Still english is not considered a romance language [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 04:49

TIL Mount Washington, N.H. has more deaths per vertical foot than any other mountain in the world. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 01:49

TIL that when a celebratory dinner in honour of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. did not garner enough support in his native Atlanta, J. Paul Austin, CEO of Coca-Cola, threatened to pull his business out of the city - within two hours of this announcement tickets were sold out. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 00:49

TIL that spelling bees are an English phenomenon. Languages like Italian and German usually don't have them because they have consistent spelling unlike English [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 22:49

TIL that the annual Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act in the US prhibits the redesign of the $1 bill because of how little it gets counterfeited. (pg 24, section 118) [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 19:49

TIL the genome of coast redwood is one of the largest known, with over 26.5 billion nucleic acid base pairs—the building blocks of DNA. In contrast, the giant sequoia genome consists of 8.125 billion base pairs, while the human genome has just over 3 billion. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 18:49

TIL that the racism in the movie ''Hidden Figures'' was highly exaggerated and the black women portrayed in the movie had almost ZERO issues because of their white colleagues or segregation laws . [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 16:49

TIL that Euler was functionally blind. In 1738, he became nearly blind in his right eye, earning the nickname "Cyclops" from Frederick II; by 1766, he lost vision in his left eye as well. Despite this, his productivity actually surged: in 1775, he wrote on average one mathematical paper per week [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 20:49

TIL Reggie from Nintendo had to fight to get Wii Sports as a pack-in, free. And Miyamoto was not happy. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 19:49

TIL a declassified FBI memo revealed that Winston Churchill privately approached a U.S. Senator in 1947 to encourage him to convince President Truman to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on Moscow [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 18:49

TIL of Botswana's real life Lion King. A Lion with such a fierce hatred and vendetta against Hyenas, they named him Ntwadumela - He Who Greets With Fire. He was even witnessed having charged an angry Bull Elephant. Ntwadumela was tragicaly gunned down by trophy hunters in 1991. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 16:49

TIL Oscar winning actor Cillian Murphy and his wife bought a cinema dating back to 1919, and that was forced to shut down during the COVID pandemic , to give it a new lease of life. You can find the Phoenix Cinema in Dingle, Ireland. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

13 апреля 2025 15:49

TIL Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister) always ended scenes with co-star Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister) by apologizing for his character's awful comments and behavior. Dance said Dinklage is "the most adorable man. After all those scenes, I apologize to him" because "I have to treat him like shit." [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 13:49

TIL Good Will Hunting was only able to film on location at Harvard after alumnus John Lithgow intervened. Harvard had initially denied the movie access to film on its campus. However, Lithgow asked the movie's location manager what he wanted and then made a phone call which ultimately delivered it. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 11:49

TIL that technically speaking, Gagarin's spaceflight is deemed as an "uncompleted spaceflight" per Section 8, paragraph 2.15, item b of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) sporting code because he was ejected out of his capsule before landing [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 04:49

TIL that in the early 1900s, hospitals refused to treat premature babies. Dr. Martin Couney set up incubator exhibits at fairs to save them—charging visitors, not parents. He saved 6,500 lives while medicine called it a “sideshow.” [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 03:49

TIL liquid breathing of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) has been tested on infants born with severe lung conditions, leading to improved lung function and oxygenation [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

12 апреля 2025 01:49

TIL That until 2022, the Japanese Public School System forced schoolgirls in Japan were forced to wear specific colours of underwear and were forced to have dyed black hair in school. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 23:49

TIL: After the trans-Saharan slave trade ended, Muslim-African Hajj pilgrims were deceived by tribal leaders, who offered low-cost travel to the East Coast. Upon arrival, they were trafficked across the Red Sea and sold into slavery in Saudi Arabia, instead of being allowed to perform the Hajj. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 21:49

TIL In 1962 commodities broker Tino De Angelis, bilked 51 banks out of over $180 million ($1.85 billion today) in what became known as the salad oil scandal. Part of his scheme involved mostly filling his storage tanks with water so that there was only a little oil on top in case of inspection. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 19:49

TIL Matt Damon wrote the first draft of Good Will Hunting's first act as an assignment in a playwriting class during his fifth year at Harvard. The only scene that survived verbatim from that "40-some-odd-page document" was the scene where Damon's character & Robin Williams' character first meet. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 18:49

TIL that cochlear implants are controversial in the Deaf community, many of whom believe that deafness is not something that needs to be cured, and that giving implants to deaf children without teaching them sign language is a form of cultural genocide [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

11 апреля 2025 15:50

TIL that in 1200 years Baghdad got attacked and besieged 16 times [Source]