› added 10 years ago

83

TIL contrary to popular belief, tortoises are in fact turtles rather than part of a separate group.

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M0jV TIL The Catholic Church unknowingly made Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) a saint after the Christianization of his life story in the 14th century.
G5Dg TIL Philadelphia is known as “The City of Brotherly Love” because it’s composed of the Greek words for love (phileo) and brother (adelphos)
ANDml TIL Achille Devéria, who was famous for painting artists and intellectuals such as Dumas, Walter Scott, Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Franz Liszt, also did a series of pornographic lithographs. Devéria's works were described as showing, "all the morals and aesthetics of the age"
6EBMQ TIL Stephen Hawking once sent his PhD student away with a very hard problem – finding exact rotating black hole solutions of Einstein’s equations with a cosmological constant – and was stunned when he came back a few days later with the solution
B0lW TIL there’s an alien visitor featured in every episode of South Park– sometimes in a flash-frame, sometimes in posters, in the background, etc.