› added 5 years ago

99

TIL a Canadian study found that Agatha Christie's later-written novels had a 30% reduction in vocabulary and other possible signs of Alzheimer's Disease.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

kJYrg TIL Although popular culture has them associated with medieval castles since the 19th century, underground prisons, dungeons and oubliettes were not as common in English Castles. Evidence suggests that rooms previously identified as dungeons, were in fact storage rooms for ice, or drainage pipes
QNGgE TIL that Tolkien realized he had created a moral dilemma when writing orcs. They're supposed to be a purely evil race for the heroes to cut through without guilt, but they could talk and knew about morality, so by Tolkien's beliefs, they couldn't be pure evil and should be given mercy if possible.
Bwnb TIL that there’s a man who shops at Trader Joe’s in Seattle and buys things in bulk and then transports them up to Vancouver to his own store called “Pirate Joe's” because there are no Trader Joe’s in Canada. He’s gotten banned at some Trader Joe’s and sometimes has to put on disguises to shop.
W7y0B TIL in 2020 a bar-tailed godwit broke the "world record" for the longest flight by a bird, flying for 11 days straight from Alaska to New Zealand, a distance of over 12,000 km or 7,500 miles.
AMNB TIL that in 1954 the economist Armen Alchian was able to figure out what the secret fuel was for the newly developed hydrogen bomb just by looking at the share prices of chemical suppliers on the stock market