› added 11 years ago

145

TIL the letter ‘Q’ was illegal in Turkey until last month

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via reddit.com

yVn6a TIL Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, an encyclopedia of navigation, has been in print since 1802. It is so popular that it's colloquially referred to after it's original author "Bowditch". In 1867 the US government bought the copyright and has published 52 editions of it since then.
yV0l8 TIL that in the days of sailing ships cannibalism among shipwrecked sailors was openly acknowledged, and castaways often admitted to drawing lots to decide who would live and who die. This was called a "custom of the sea" excused because of the dire necessity
BrA0D TIL that Velociraptors were the size of a turkey in real life, not 2m (6 1⁄2 ft) tall as they were portrayed in Jurassic Park movie.
xVMYk TIL During the NYC blackout of 1977, the crew filming “Superman” outside the old Daily News building on 42nd Street lent their klieg lights to the editors so they could see the newspaper pages they were laying out.
69ElJ TIL that there are more possible QR code combinations than there are atoms in the universe.