› added 4 years ago

63

TIL that "Billion" is the European name for "Trillion" in the US (10^12) and "Trillion" is the European name for "Quintillion" in the US (10^18).

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

pGg8 TIL Director, Robert Rodriguez was commissioned to video tape his high school’s football games but was promptly fired because he shot them “with a cinematic style, getting shots of parents’ reactions and the ball traveling through the air instead of shooting the whole play.”
5YWXD TIL of the Giant Impact hypothesis, where a Mars-sized planet, Theia, is theorized to have collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago. The debris from both planets eventually coalesced to form the Moon.
KYXj9 TIL that there is an island between Spain and France whose administration alternates every 6 months between both nations.
O9A7 TIL when Dr. Jonas Salk (discoverer and developer of the first polio vaccine) was asked who owned the patent he replied “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Forbes calculated the vaccine to be “worth” 7 billion dollars. Happy 100th birthday you magnificent bastard.
xBgb TIL that doctors in countries with more “socialized medicine” only make slightly less annually than U.S. doctors. A major argument against social medicine is that doctors should be well-paid, and social medicine would demand major pay cuts.