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TIL Quarantine is from Italian 'quaranta giorni', meaning "forty days", used in 14th-15th-century Venetian dialect and designating the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic

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edKL TIL The space shuttle Challenger explosion did not immediately kill the crew. The undamaged crew compartment broke free and continued to gain altitude to a peak of 65,000 feet before beginning a 2 minute 45 second free-fall into the Atlantic ocean.
N7A5b TIL the 'Butterfly Effect' can be traced back to a short story called 'A Sound of Thunder', written by Ray Bradbury in 1952.
nedPb TIL Bruce Lee could deliver a blow in 5/10 of a second from a distance of one meter (and 8/10 of a second from a meter and a half). It's 1/20 of the time it takes for a person to blink. At the time the standard cameras couldn't cope with the speed of Bruce's blows. His strikes were not visible.
GBYN TIL Germany has ‘Tauchgondeln’ [diving gondolas]. They’re tourist attractions where a pressurized room on a pole gets lowered down into the sea. They’re unique to Germany and there are only four of them.
oMBr TIL the average cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds.