› added 9 years ago

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TIL that the word “lethologica” describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

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b9kmZ TIL that a con man tricked Al Capone out of $5,000. He got Capone to give him $50,000 to invest in a scam. After 2 months, he returned it. He told Capone that the scam had fallen through, and he had no money left to support himself. Capone, stung by his honesty, gave him $5,000 to “tide him over”.
4J0g TIL that the last country to go to war with Vietnam was China, in 1979. The Sino-Vietnamese War lasted 3 weeks and 6 days, and Chinese suffered more than 60,000 casualties.
GYP55 TIL that the reflex of sneezing because of sunlight is called the Photic Sneeze Reflex. It is also known as Autosomal Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst, which can be abbreviated as ACHOO.
X0X9k TIL that Unicode uses elephants as a baseline comparison for cultural frequency when considering whether to add a new emoji
yQRQM TIL when kerosene disrupted whale oil for lamps, two companies—Lever Brothers and Margarine Unie—discovered how to harden whale oil into margarine. They bought up all the whale oil, met with success and are a $150B corporation today, better known as Unilever!