› added 4 years ago

478

TIL that the current 50-star American flag was designed by a kid in high school.

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via reddit.com

P1PbE TIL that at the opening ceremonies to the 1936 Summer Olympics, the event organizers made the mistake of shooting off a cannon after they had released hundreds of pigeons. While the cannon shot blanks, the sound of the shot scared the birds so much that they defecated on the athletes below.
GYMB5 TIL about melanism, the opposite of albinism
69PZW TIL that four years after the RMS Titanic sunk, its sister ship, the RMS Britannic, also sunk after striking a German mine. Then, in 1918, the RMS Carpathia - known as the the ship that rescued the Titanic’s survivors, also sunk after being torpedoed by a German submarine.
xVn05 TIL From 1847, Rudolf Wolf started counting sunspots. He peered through a telescope every day, if he could, and recorded the number of spots he observed. Today, all sorts of models use Wolf's sunspot record to predict things like the climate, the orbit of satellites, and the stability of power grids
pNv4 TIL James Cameron sought Hollywood funding for the movie Titanic not because he wanted to make the movie, but because he “wanted to dive to the shipwreck.”