› added 10 months ago

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TIL that Thales, a greek philosopher who according to tradition was one of the first to predict an eclipse, thought that water was the most basic form of matter.

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via reddit.com

d8Jxj TIL that card payments company Visa has a secret datacentre with the modern-day equivalent of a medieval moat to protect it: hydraulic bollards in the road can stop a car going 50mph, while cars going faster will spin out of control around a hairpin bend that will send them into a drainage pond
d8mdK TIL that hundreds of women disguised themselves as men in order to fight in the American Civil War. They were first discovered in 1863, when a Union burial detail found that the corpse of a woman wearing the uniform of a Confederate private. Estimates put the number of female soldiers at 400-750.
rRE60 TIL Mark Twain came into the world with Halley’s Comet, and (just like he predicted) he went out with it as well.
yGVJ TIL A man outsourced his entire job to China while sitting at his desk browsing reddit
wLA07 TIL Bar soap is way more environmentally friendly than liquid soap. Carboon footprint to make liquid soap is 25% larger and requires 5 times more energy to produce