› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Bugs Bunny inadvertently transformed the word nimrod into a synonym for idiot because nobody understood his joke comparing Elmer Fudd to the Biblical figure Nimrod Aka A Great Hunter.

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R5W6 TIL that there is a Velcro alternative that is 8x stronger than Velcro
m1OmM TIL people who have their lens surgicallly removed are able to see UV light
p8PyA TIL that in 1710, almost 100 years before the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Native American leaders traveled to Great Britain to meet the Queen.
wLoZo The numbers tell the story: Of the 648 people killed by lightning in the U.S. from 1995 to 2008, 82 percent were male. And as much as we were hoping to uncover a biological cause—extra iron in the male cranium, perhaps, or the conductive properties of testosterone—it turns out men are... just kind of stupid. “Men take more risks in lightning storms,” says John Jensenius, a lightning safety expert with the National Weather Service.
ZNRG TIL that the world almost came to an end in 1983 when a malfunctioning Soviet satellite falsely reported multiple launches of American ICBMs to a Russian bunker. Citing a “funny feeling in my gut,” the bunker commander directly disobeyed military protocol by not ordering retaliatory strikes