› added 4 months ago

41

TIL Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds artwork is made of 100 million porcelain seeds, handcrafted by 1,600+ artisans from Jingdezhen, China, a city known as the "Porcelain Capital". The seeds represent optimism during difficult times.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

nWBpd TIL of the Tanana River Bridge (Railroad bridge), Alaska's longest bridge was completed in 2014 at a cost of $187M (tax dollars). It connects nothing, there is no railroad on either side.
lokRN TIL that the computer chips that are put into spacecraft are not state of the art, but are so old as to be obsolete. Their known reliability makes up for it.
vP5VB TIL In 1976, 2 unarmed US officers were killed by North Korea for pruning a tree in the DMZ. A few days later, the US sent another heavily armed detail to complete the mission, backed this time by artillery, tanks and 27 helicopters while fighter jets and nuclear-armed B-52's circled overhead
4kmWR TIL about Moe Berg, a baseball player who learned 7 languages from Princeton and a law degree from Columbia. He worked as a spy in Europe during WW2, and was ordered to attend a lecture by Heisenberg and shoot him if he determined the Germans were close to the bomb. He determined that they were not.
7rjQx TIL that the residents of Glasgow, Scotland, donated more money to the UK's WW1 tank program than any other city. A year later, tanks were sent into Glasgow to help suppress a strike of workers demanding higher post-war wages. (The photo in this article is from the fundraising, not the strike)