› added 7 years ago

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TIL that a Northwest flight once flew unresponsive for 100 miles past its destination because the pilots were busy with their laptops and didn't hear air traffic controller's radio calls.

EAOW TIL Loki once talked the Gods into making a bad bet with a Giant which would have lost them the sun, the moon, and the goddess Freyja. Ordered to put it right, he took the form of a mare, seduced the Giant’s stallion, sabotaging the bet. Loki later gave birth to a gray foal with eight legs.
oRAJW TIL that ancient numeral systems like Egyptian hieratic, Greek, Hebrew, Roman, Chinese, and early Indian Brahmi were all non-positional decimal systems, requiring large numbers of symbols. The world’s earliest positional decimal system was the Chinese rod calculus.
J1aP1 TIL that in 1972, the CBC challenged listeners to complete the saying "As Canadian as..." Heather Scott answered the challenge with "... possible under the circumstances."
xV91g TIL that in 1951, a woman sitting in her Florida apartment caught on fire. When found the next day, all that was left was her backbone, her left foot and her skull, shrunk to the size of a cup. Nothing else in the apartment burned. Police were stumped. Some think it was spontaneous human combustion.
LDwP TIL the Soviets had made a prototype laser pistol for use by their astronauts. The pistol was deigned to burn a hole through the spacesuits of enemy astronauts, killing them via suffocation and/or explosive decompression.