› added 11 months ago

48

TIL in America a prison's arm is swabbed with alcohol before a lethal injection, to prevent infection

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4Xjj6 TIL a tanner, John J. Loud, desiring a pen that could write on leather, invented the first ballpoint pen and patented it in 1888. This pen had a small steel ball which was placed so it could not fall out nor fall in but it still could rotate freely. Loud's invention then was not commercially viable.
5VQXD TIL Giraffes need surprisingly little sleep. The average giraffe sleeps for 4.6 hours per day.
LkMZm TIL of Dunbar's number, proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and avg. social group size. By using the avg. human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships
oRBWo TIL that Outback Steakhouse was founded in Tampa, FL by four Americans who had never visited Australia. They simply saw an opportunity to ride the wave of popularity of all things Australian following the 1986 film Crocodile Dundee. Their concept was “American food and Australian fun.”
nWJjG TIL the Woodstock 1999 festival was so ill-prepared for the crowd size that portable toilets overflowed and there was no shade from the heat. Attendees started playing in mud to cool off unaware it was contaminated by waste leaking from toilets leading to many cases of trench mouth and trench foot.