› added 9 years ago

57

TIL on British coins, the direction in which the monarch’s head faces alternates with each successive monarch.

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aw450 TIL in 1945, a school dropout and self-taught electrical engineer named Percy Spencer was working at Ratheon. He stepped in front of a magnetron, a device that powers radars. He noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Later that year, he filed a patent for the first microwave oven.
9wPMm TIL in a rare move for a large corporation, SC Johnson voluntarily stopped using Polyvinylidene chloride in saran wrap which made it cling but was harmful to the planet. They lost a huge market share.
wDrJ TIL Jupiter is a “cosmic vacuum cleaner.” Its gravitational influence causes comets and asteroids to collide with it. The rate of impacts on Jupiter is about 2000-8000X higher than the rate on Earth. Without Jupiter, the probability of asteroid impacts with the inner planets would be much greater.
ZKWa TIL that Wikipedia had to ban IP’s from Congress to stop them from changing each other’s entries.
k5gE TIL Murakami when writing a novel gets up at 4am writes for 6 hrs then runs 10k or swims 1500m (or both) then sleeps by 9pm because repetition is a form of mesmerism to reach a deeper state of mind