› added 3 years ago

64

TIL that the reason old pubs have "Ye Old" instead of "The Old" is because when the printing press was invented in Germany, they didn't have any letters for the old letter Thorn, which made a "th" sound. Thorn ultimately was replaced with Y because they looked similar until the Th start was popular.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

p8Vo4 TIL: the deep ocean is heterogenous and made up of discrete water masses, which can be tracked, measured, and dated; some water masses are up to 1,500 years old!
e4GE TIL that over the last 100 years, the U.S. has almost emptied the aquifer that took nature more than 10,000 years to fill—and it’s the aquifer that waters our breadbasket region.
v6OD TIL on July 4, 1054, A supernova was seen by Chinese, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers near the star Zeta Tauri. For several months it remained bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants now form the Crab Nebula.
E19Nw TIL that during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in the 40s, an American named Claire Phillips ran Manila's hottest nightclub which was a front for a spy ring that funneled information from drunk Japanese officers to guerilla groups outside the city.
bWW9 TIL that Beer was probably one of the most crucial and influential inventions of mankind, possibly even influencing the invention/discovery of mathematics and written language.