› added 8 years ago

63

TIL that when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard came together to form a company they simply flipped a coin to decide whos name came first, giving us Hewlett Packard.

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lo8Y7 TIL that the Mask of Warka, the oldest discovered accurate depiction of a human face (3100 BC), disappeared from the National Museum of Iraq after the 2003 US invasion. A US military mission to recover lost artifacts found the mask, undamaged, buried in a farmer's backyard.
4kNmR TIL that the largest living organism on Earth is not a blue whale or an elephant, but actually a fungus. Covering over 2,200 acres in Oregon, the Armillaria ostoyae fungus, also known as the Humongous Fungus, is estimated to be between 2,400 and 8,650 years old and weighs over 6,000 tons.
GYe5G TIL in 2009, police in San Jose, California engaged in a 17-hour standoff with an empty house.
O8E7 TIL that the King in front of a snake’s name (as in King Cobra) means that it eats other snakes
9Y5b7 TIL that Benjamin Franklin used chess as a means of learning Italian. He would play games with a friend who was also studying the language. The winner of their match assigned a task to the loser; such as making them learn some Italian grammar, which had to be performed before their next match.