› added 7 years ago

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TIL that the 2011 earthquake in Japan was so powerful it moved Honshu (the main island of Japan) 2.4m (8 ft) to the east, shifted the Earth on its axis by estimates of between 10 cm and 25 cm, and increased earth's rotational speed by 1.8 µs per day.

4XDGb TIL that there is a poem written in 1936 by David Shulman called Washington Crossing the Delaware, a 14-line rhyming sonnet in which every line is an anagram of the title
4X1Ma TIL that in 2014, actor William Hurt and a film crew shot a scene on a railroad trestle. The production team lied about getting permission to film on the tracks, and a train came mid-scene, giving the cast and crew less than a minute to evacuate. One crew member died and many were injured.
b9DVQ TIL that Alexa can analyze patterns of word use, manner of pronunciation and voice characteristics to learn about my "body features, gender, age, personality traits, mental and physical health, emotions, degree of intoxication and sleepiness, geographical origin and socioeconomic status."
JYR6k TIL one of the selling points for introducing the guillotine during the French Revolution was equality - commoners could now enjoy the comparatively quick and painless death of decapitation just like the nobility, and would no longer have to endure brutal deaths such as those caused by hanging.
R5MK1 TIL Texas and California have bigger GDPs (2022) than most counties ranked by GDP. California's massive 3.6 trillion GDP and Texas's similarly massive 2.4 trillion GDP puts them at rank 4th and 6th respectively among other countries in the world.