› added 5 years ago

115

TIL had it not been for the Norman Conquest of 1066, the English we speak today would have been much different and more restrictive. The merging of Old English and Norman French led to Modern English being sort of hybrid of the two, giving another shade of meaning to words such as "swine" vs "pork".

Read more geoffboxell.tripod.com

via reddit.com

vJyL TIL of the Yellow Fleet, 15 ships trapped in the Suez Canal for 8 years as a result of hostilities between Egypt and Israel. Over time they formed a micronation, a yacht club and staged the Bitter Lake Olympic Games.
Y7XrA TIL that from 1263 to 1328, the Byzantine Empire were in an alliance with the Mongols
ZpW1R TIL a man was awarded $412 million against a men's health clinic that misdiagnosed him with erectile dysfunction & unnecessarily gave him 3 penile injections a week to treat it, which caused irreversible damage. It's the largest amount ever awarded by a jury in the US in a medical malpractice case.
bA4 TIL that the real Zorro was an Irish genius who strangled himself at the stake before the fires could reach him.
m1LXM TIL about Theseus, a robotic mouse created by Claude Shannon in the 1950s, which could learn to navigate mazes using telephone relay switches, marking one of the first instances of machine learning. Theseus helped researchers better understand routing in telephone networks of that era.