› added 7 years ago

139

TIL that an annual televised showing of Disney cartoons at Christmas Eve is a serious Swedish holiday tradition of near-Super Bowl level viewership

Read more slate.com

via reddit.com

68kQ TIL A city in California almost stopped the usage of Styrofoam cups because they were known to be made using “dihydrogen monoxide”, completely neglecting the fact that the substance is plain water.
4enJ TIL that scientific pioneer Nikola Tesla was skeptical of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. In 1892 he started work on his own “dynamic theory of gravity.” This was revealed when he announced the near completion of the project at age 81. He died 5 years later and the project was never found.
xLo1 TIL in 1981 a man with cerebral palsy appeared on a UK kids’ TV show to demonstrate how much a disabled person can achieve. Instead it sparked a nationwide trend of schoolchildren mocking his speech and calling each other “spastic” as an insult.
Vy6B TIL that the ‘perfect body’ for men went from chubby, to skinny to muscular over the last 150 years.
pYBmp TIL that the homeownership rate is the proportion of households occupied by the owner divided by the total number of occupied households, so it does not actually reflect the % of human beings that rent - say you have 5 room mates. You only count as 1 "renter", the way the data usually presented