› added 7 years ago

162

TIL that Byzantium not only developed sophisticated systems for taxation, justice, administration, and military deployment, but is also rarely credited with refuting Aristotle’s theory of falling bodies, one thousand years before Galileo.

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dDAp9 TIL that the white house used to be open to the public and that in 1829 a rowdy crowd of 20,000 people celebrating Andrew Jackson's inauguration had to be lured out of the White House with washtubs filled with orange juice and whiskey.
a86eN TIL there is an artificial island in Maldives called Thilafushi, which was created as a landfill to help with the waste from the capital city Malé. This dumpsite has been neglected and abandoned for the last three decades and it is now just starting to see positive changes.
R5Dd6 TIL due to the failure of the Boeing 2707, a Concorde competitor, and a downturn in general aviation in the 1970s, Boeing fired 60,000 employees. So many people left Seattle that a billboard was placed near the airport that read "Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?"
1vl7 TIL that it is likely there are 5 to 10 times more stars in the known Universe than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches but that a single grain of sand has more atoms than there are stars in the known Universe.
wLVN1 TIL Wild animals such as coyotes and bobcats will not eat a dead meth user. They can smell the chemicals meth leaves behind.