› added 10 years ago

166

TIL Nimrod was originally a great hunter in the Book of Genesis. In 1932, when Bugs Bunny called infamously bad hunter Elmer Fudd “nimrod” sarcastically in a Looney Tunes short, people missed the Biblical reference and assumed the word was just a generic insult.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

VBGnm TIL that the Pantheon’s oculus serves as a natural heating and cooling system, this opening allows sunlight to illuminate the interior and helps regulate temperature. The open design also enables rainwater to enter, which drains through a sophisticated floor system
40yo TIL that 7th Century general Khalid bin al-Waleed swallowed poison to demonstrate how much of a hard-ass he was. Instantly shrugging it off because he’d built up resistance since childhood, his enemy immediately surrendered.
BrONk TIL Shenzhou 3, launched in 2002, lasted 6 days and carried a dummy into orbit to simulate physiological signals of a human — palpitation, pulse, breathing, eating, metabolism, and excretion
9QLm TIL During the horsemeat scandal earlier this year, meat pie from Iceland was tested and was found to contain no meat
kyRE TIL in 1958, the Chinese captured a US Sidewinder missile just four days after it was introduced into combat when it got stuck in a Chinese jet during a dogfight with Taiwan aircraft. It was reverse-engineered into the Soviet AA-2 Atoll (K-13) missile and used against US planes in Vietnam.