› added 11 years ago

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TIL The Thuggee cult (from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) was a real cult of assassins that worshipped Kali

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aw00Z TIL that in medieval years, an hour was divided into 4 puncta (quarter-hours), 10 minuta, or 40 momenta. So if you asked someone to "wait a moment", turns out that you really asked them to wait for about 90 seconds.
j9wE TIL that 16% of polled Czech citizens believe in a god, giving it the lowest rate in the EU
XP5X TIL Frank Zappa and his friends were confronted at home by a fan brandishing a gun. Frank took him to the pond outside and invented a ceremony where everyone had to throw something in it; the fan threw in his gun
8eEDb TIL that Charles Darwin often gave his old papers to his children for them to doodle on. Thus, much of what survives of his original Origin of Species manuscript represents the best of his children's writing and drawings, rather than the best of his work.
VBlBm TIL that for 2 years Ghanaian and foreign scientists investigated what they thought was a monkey-borne outbreak stemming from a large forest, only for it later to be revealed the area had neither a forest nor any monkeys and was in fact a large industrial city.