› added 2 weeks ago

5

TIL Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” played on AFN radio in South Vietnam was the signal to Americans to begin evacuation in 1975

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RRp1 TIL the Romans had multi tools long before the Swiss made them.
4X5a5 TIL Arabic numerals (our numbers today) were first popularized in Europe by Fibonacci when he learned about them in Algeria.
VMV8m TIL that the saying “put a sock in it” is believed to come from the early 20th century, when people would stuff socks into their gramophones (a device for recording, reproduction and sound), to make it quiet, because the gramophones did not have volume controls.
NQZN TIL Mission Control acknowledged a thousand year old Chinese myth when it asked the Apollo 11 crew to keep an eye out for a beautiful Chinese girl named Chang-O who lived on the moon and a large rabbit standing in the shade of a cinnamon tree
jNebj TIL the president of Peru from 1990 until 2000 was a full blooded Japanese man.