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TIL of the unit of measurement, "smoot", which is named after an MIT prank on Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity pledge, Oliver Smoot, whose body was used to measure the Harvard Bridge in 1958. One smoot is 5 foot 7 inches and length of the Harvard Bridge is 364.4 smoots.

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oRexY TIL The term “Romance languages” has nothing to do with being languages of love, but rather because they all descend from the same parent language- Latin, the language of the Romans. The English term “romance” descends from the French word for a particular Latin dialect called Romanicus.
Oo907 TIL authors C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on November 22nd, 1963. Their deaths weren't as prominent in the news because of a more noteworthy death that occurred on that day: the assassination of John F. Kennedy
JYv8k TIL the movie "Baby Driver" was first imagined when director Edgar Wright heard the song "Bellbottoms" and imagined a getaway driver waiting for his crew to complete a bank heist. He tested the concept while directing the music video for "Blue Song" by Mint Royal in 2003, almost 15 years earlier.
kDa4 TIL of the Taxil Hoax, where a Frenchman spent 12 years as a Roman Catholic writing anti-Masonic accounts, only to reveal it was a prank on the Church. As he said “…I thought I would kill myself laughing at some of the things proposed, but everything went; there is no limit to human stupidity”
OGLL TIL as Apple is granted “Slide-to-Unlock” patent, they in a case against Motorola also argued “a tap is a zero-length swipe.”