› added 12 years ago

118

TIL “cracker” as an insult means “one who cracks the whip”.

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woyn6 TIL the Canadian Government once approved a plan to extract oil from the Alberta oilsands using nukes, and the project only died because public opinion on nuclear devices soured after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Y77EZ TIL When Caesar said, 'the die is cast' he was quoting a comedian. The phrase comes from Arrhephoros, a play by the Greek comedian Menanders, and Caesar originally said it in Greek.
VVQk TIL in 1990, composer Leonard Bernstein has left a password-protected memoir. To this day, no one has been able to break the password.
0drJN TIL that thing that you toss into those rectangles while playing hopscotch has a name other than that thing you toss into those rectangles while playing hopscotch. It's called a "lagger".
E1YBP TIL Naked mole rats defy the biological law of aging - They rarely get cancer, are resistant to some types of pain, and can survive up to 18 minutes without oxygen. But perhaps their greatest feat, a new paper suggests, is that they don't age. Naked mole-rat mortality rates do not increase with age.