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TIL that the reason that Australia is formally named "The Commonwealth of Australia" is that the framers who wrote the Australian Constitution were obsessed with a book called "The American Commonwealth" that described American democracy in the 1870's. They give it the same "reverence as the Bible".

Read more hcourt.gov.au

via reddit.com

LQM8Q TIL that the Indian mathematician and astronomer Baudhayana, who lived around 800 BCE, wrote the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra, which describes the construction of various geometric shapes using a rope known as a "sulba” with precise geometric measurements, the Pythagorean theorem, area of a circle.
45vo TIL that in 1990 a wrongly-installed windscreen on BA Flight 5390 fell out, causing the plane’s cockpit to decompress and its captain to be pulled halfway out of the aircraft at over 17,000 feet. The crew held on to the captain’s body fearing it get sucked into the engine. The captain survived.
ANJZn TIL that (one of) the oldest surviving depiction(s) of Jesus is a piece of graffiti from about 200 AD, mocking a man worshipping a figure on a cross with a donkey head.
j6eRa TIL The precursor to 'the rack' torture device was the Hippocratic bench, a medical device used to straighten the spine/set bones.
8eBAG TIL that the F-22 Raptor took so long to develop, that the CPUs for its in flight computer had become obsolete by three generations by the time the first production jet flew in 1997, resulting in even further delays as a new flight computer had to be designed based on the PowerPC processor.