› added 6 years ago

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TIL Ice Cream sundaes were invented when it became illegal to sell ice-cream sodas on a Sunday in the American town of Evanston during the late 19th century. To get around the problem some traders replaced the soda with syrup and called the dessert an "Ice Cream Sunday."

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gMY99 TIL that Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős worked on mathematics for up to 20 hours a day and at the end of his life had output a mathematical yield of roughly 1,500 papers, an order of magnitude higher than his most prolific and famous colleagues. Of these roughly 1,500 papers 507 were co-written.
KYEp4 TIL about Zealanda (or ‘Tasmantis’), which was once the eighth continent.
R5V67 TIL in 1842, PT Barnum, a.k.a The Great Showman, showed off a "Fiji Mermaid". Barnum insisted it was an authentic skeleton from a mermaid, but on his death bed, admitted what folks saw was the skeleton of a monkey torso and fishtail sewed together made by Japanese sailors in 1822
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xV71w TIL that despite having a reputation for deadly wildlife there has only been one confirmed death by spider bite in Australia since 1979