› added 2 years ago

117

TIL that Cape Disappointment was so named, by John Meares in 1788, who was searching for the mouth of the Columbia River as charted on Spanish maps. He had found the river but mistakenly thought the mouth was a bay, that the Spanish maps were wrong, and called it Deception Bay.

yQMnX TIL A telescope designed to view the H-alpha emission produced by excited hydrogen can show granulations on the solar surface and great detail in the sunspot regions. The H-alpha filter must be designed to produce a very narrow pass band around the wavelength of 6,562.8 Ångströms for safe viewing
yR7J TIL there is a pig chief character named Spa'am in “Muppet Treasure Island.” Hormel Foods (the makers of Spam) filed a lawsuit against Jim Henson Productions which failed. The judge who dismissed it said “one might think Hormel would welcome the association with a genuine source of pork.”
KOgy4 TIL that in 2005, Fox aired a reality television series titled Who's Your Daddy? The show's premise was that an adult who had been put up for adoption as an infant was placed in a room with 25 men, one of whom was their biological father. If the contestant could guess correctly, they won 100k!
6ElOY TIL there was a sign language developed in the Rennell Island by a deaf person living there, that was only used by him and his acquaintances and disappeared when he died.
vGL4 TIL quicksand scenes appeared in 3% of all movies in the 1960s, but claims of REAL human deaths by quicksand are nonexistant or poorly supported. (more in comments)