› added 4 years ago

79

TIL of Tilly Bébé, a circus performer famous for her taming of large predators. She was small and dressed like a doll while performing with hyenas, lions and even groups of 40 polar bears. Silent footage of her life with the animals helped pioneer a new "exotic-erotic-escapist" genre of film.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

OGAMR TIL: In China, Mei Nü, or "Nowhere girls" refer to women who have money, no job, no education, no prospects, no looks, no friends, and no sophistication. The causes have linked to familial trauma or over pampering and spoiled leading to difficulties finding employment.
P6ag TIL of The Dire Wolf Project, a project to breed German Shepherds to resemble dire wolves. It started in 1988 and focuses first on health and temperament. They are enormous, scary, shaggy and, by all accounts, terribly sweet.
egkn TIL Nicholas Saunderson (1683-1739) lost his eyes to smallpox before he was a year old, yet he taught himself to read by tracing the letters on gravestones and learned languages and mathematics by pricking holes in paper. He became the fourth professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.
16VKP TIL that Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler is actually about vampires in love.
OovNg TIL the integral of the secant formula, important in cartography, has been found accidentally when a mathematician was running through numerical approximations known at the time and recognized they matched ln(|tan(phi/2 + pi/4)|). It took 28 more years for someone find a formal proof