› added 1 year ago

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TIL that some Bronze Age Anatolians worshipped a god of unclear domain named Santa (no relation)

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lorWa TIL about the Fast Inverse Square Root, an ingenious set of code that quickly calculated accurate square roots in Quake 3 using floating points and Newton's method. However, it is not exactly known who on the dev team implemented the code.
5w6n TIL before the invention of antivenom, the black mamba had a 100% fatality rate and it’s victims would be dead in about 20 minutes.
78Vop TIL that the oldest door in Rome, the Pantheon Gate, is over 2000 years old and weighs over a tone. Despite this, it is very well balanced and can actually be opened by one person.
16px7 TIL - in 1958, the US Air Force ran Project A119, to nuke the Moon with an H-Bomb
K77B TIL the Maunder minimum was a period of record-low sunspot activity that lasted from 1645 to 1715. This period coincides with the Little Ice Age and suggested to scientists that solar activity plays a major role in Earth’s climate.