› added 1 year ago

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TIL about Internet Group Suicide - a common thing in Japan in the early 2000's. The phenomenon of committing suicide with a group of random people who met on online forums

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via reddit.com

yMdp TIL that there is no freight rail crossing of the Hudson River south of Albany, so any train travelling south from NYC must take a 280-mile detour or float across on barges
wpxP TIL The Egyptians, not Julius Caesar, were the fathers of the modern calendar. The Roman calendar was lunar and had 355 days. Egyptians knew it was 365 days because the Nile would peak on the same day each year. Caesar learned this from his affair with Cleopatra and created the Julian calendar.
N7YG1 TIL that in 1951 the St. Louis Browns used Eddie Gaedel, a little person, to pinch hit for an easy walk. It was the first and last time a little person played in a Major League Baseball game.
6EB1J TIL that the forbidden fruit in the Bible is never defined as an apple. It is in fact a mistranslation that originates from the fact that the tree is defined as as "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" and that in Latin, mălum means evil while the very similar word mālum means apple.
R7Gm1 TIL that the Navy has a program for intentionally sinking old vessels to become artificial reefs for marine life. The first and largest of these vessels was the USS Oriskany, an aircraft carrier built at the end of WWII, which was sent to the ocean floor off the coast of Florida in 2006.