› added 2 months ago

9

TIL Mary Ann Hall’s House on Penn. Ave. in Washington, D.C., was the premier brothel during the Civil War. Known for its cleanliness, fine dining, elegant furnishings, and discretion, it offered patrons a place to drink wine, socialize, and enjoy the company of well-dressed—and undressed—women.

Read more smithsonianmag.com

via reddit.com

Z8yyB TIL that one of the earliest uses for the term Round Robin was a document signed by multiple parties in a circle to make it more difficult to determine the order in which it was signed, thus preventing a ringleader from being identified, a mutiny on a ship for example.
wbLP TIL Australian astronomers discovered a mysterious signal to be their microwave oven after 17 years
R5804 TIL that I've been calling everything an ACRONYM when in fact they could instead be an INITIALISM. An acronym can be spoken like a word e.g. FIFA, NASA, RAM, where as an initialism cannot be easily spoken as a word e.g. FBI, CIA, UFO, HSBC, and are instead pronounced letter by letter.
LkdkV TIL: The Ogre Faced Spider's eyes are more sensitive than both a cat's and an owls, but every day at dawn the photosensitive portion of it's eyes are destroyed by the sun, and the arachnid has to regrow this portion each and every evening.
BgrDx TIL a significant part of the local economy of Kinmen County is making high quality chef's knives from the over 1 million artillery shells fired on the island in the 1950s. Shells filled with propaganda leaflets instead of explosives landed whole, leaving tons of high quality steel lying around.