› added 12 years ago

208

TIL Inside Abraham Lincoln’s pocket watch is a long-hidden message

Read more smithsonianmag.com

via reddit.com

oVGo TIL of the ‘Japanese Smoking Paradox’ where Japanese smokers smoke more than US/European males but have much lower lung cancer rates and nobody is entirely sure why.
mxv6v TIL that in 1900 a young clerk at a British shipping company observed a fortune in rubber returning from the Congo while only guns and manacles were being sent in return. He correctly deduced that these resources were being extracted from the population by force and campaigned to expose the abuses.
APZw TIL a NFL game is 60 minutes by regulation, in total lasts 3 hours and 10 mins, and consists of ONLY 11 MINUTES of actual gameplay.
yQnGe TIL In case of an emergency, Switzerland could fit 114% of its population in bunkers.
Gwjj TIL The first computer programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace, who in 1842 wrote and published an algorithm to calculate Bernoulli Numbers on Charles Babbage’s analytical machine.