› added 5 years ago

92

TIL of the Roman military ritual evocatio, in which they'd attempt to deprive an enemy of divine protection by summoning their god and promising to worship it better

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BgalK Today I learned that in the "Yankee Doodle" song, "macaroni" does not refer to pasta. It is an 18th-century description of men who dress effeminately.
e0NQ6 TIL Kvass, like many of the oldest-known beer styles, was likely discovered by accident. Somebody drank the water-bread mixture that had been sitting out for a few days and decided what it had turned into was something worth making again
dDk8j TIL A town in Norway has a "seed bank" that stores over 1M seeds from all over the world in case of a nuclear event or any other global catastrophe
VMZkG TIL the composition technology used in the penguin animation scene of Mary Poppins wasn't green/blue screen but actually a whole new process called Sodium Vapor Process. They only made one camera for it since they could never recreate the central piece of technology that made it work - a prism
loB0V TIL that after Beethoven went deaf, he found he could affix a metal rod to his piano and bite down on it while he played, enabling him to hear perfectly through vibrations in his jawbone. The process is called bone conduction.