› added 5 years ago

197

TIL Pat Sajak and Vanna White work only 36 days per year. They work 4 days per month for 9 months, filming six episodes of Wheel of Fortune from 12 noon to 6pm. It amounts to a full year’s worth of programming for ABC.

Read more wlky.com

via reddit.com

e0mpD TIL that a high school in Morgan Freeman's hometown of Charleston, Mississippi held its first racially integrated prom in 2008, 54 years after the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. Freeman offered to pay for the event if the school board agreed to desegregate.
5VvP TIL They are so good at recycling, Sweden actually imports garbage
KOO7Q Imagine yourself at a concert hall looking at a symphonic orchestra on stage. Have you ever noticed that high-pitched strings sit left of low-pitched strings? Going from left to right, one usually sees violins, violas, cellos and double basses. That is, one moves from high pitches on the left to low pitches on the right. Why? The orchestra’s arrangement is not a cultural oddity, like driving on the right side of the road. Rather, it is due to our own biological makeup. Higher pitches tend to be better processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while lower pitches tend to be better processed by a similar region in the right hemisphere. This organisation is thought to have repercussions far beyond music, perhaps even helping to explain why language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. So the part of my brain that better processes high sounds sits where the higher-pitched instruments sit: on the left. But that’s not the end of the story.
BrpJd TIL that a woman, whose husband died fighting the Nazis, requested to be allowed to drive a tank to avenge her husband. She proved herself a skilled tank driver, died from injuries obtained in battle, and was posthumously named Hero of the Soviet Union.
Zo9o TIL The platypus is actually not the only surviving member of its biological family. There is a small hedgehog like spiked ant-eater called a “Echidna” that is the only other surviving member of the same biological order. It is also the only other surviving mammal that lays eggs.