› added 1 year ago

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TIL about The Tarasque, a creature from French mythology. According to the Golden Legend, the beast had a lion-like head, a body protected by turtle-like carapace(s), six feet with bear-like claws, a serpent's tail, and could expel a poisonous breath.

p8PKN TIL two right-wing political advisors, Lyn Nofziger and Frank Mankiewicz, convinced President Reagan to halt metrication in the US by dissolving the US Metric Board, effectively killing the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
165Ed TIL that Davy Crockett wasn't just a person known for the Alamo but also the name for a nuclear recoilless gun capable of launching a nuclear round with a yield of 0.02 kilotonnes.
oRYWW TIL about the Axis of evil in Cosmology. It’s the correlation between the plane of the Solar System and aspects of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and gives the plane of the Solar System and hence the location of Earth a greater significance than is expected by chance.
mxMZP TIL that the Constitutional Apportionment Amendment, which was the first article of what would eventually become the Bill of Rights, had a matematical error in it that would have made it impossible to enforce. Despite the error, the amendment came a state away from passing on two separate occasions.
MexOb TIL that silly string has military usage in the detection of tripwires. The string would settle onto the ground in areas without tripwires, but catch on to any that is present. The silly string reveals the wire, but it will not set it off due to its light weight.