› added 4 years ago

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TIL that the word restaurant (meaning "[something] restoring") was first used in France in the 16th century, to refer to a highly concentrated, inexpensive soup, sold by street vendors, that was advertised as an antidote to physical exhaustion.

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wLGrW TIL The German military manual states that a military order is not binding if it is not "of any use for service," or cannot reasonably be executed. Soldiers must not obey unconditionally, the government wrote in 2007, but carry out "an obedience which is thinking.".
PY4YZ TIL Canary Islands are actually named after dogs, not canaries. Their name comes from the latin "Canariae Insulae", which means "islands of dogs"
PYdRG TIL that satellites in the 1960s used nuclear radiation for power by radioisotope thermoelectric generators. However, in 1964 such a satellite disintegrated and spread approx. 1 kg of radioactive plutonium-238 over the planet. This failure led NASA to develop solar PV energy technology.
j6jYj TIL A brown dwarf star is 13 to 80 times the size of Jupiter but doesn't have enough mass to fuse hydrogen (they can fuse deuterium and massive ones can fuse lithium). Because of the lack of energy some brown dwarfs put out little to no light and can have a surface temperature as low as -23C (-10F).
GYXrJ TIL Scot-free originally meant tax-free, scot is the Middle English word for tax. It later took on its current meaning of escaping consequences.