› added 4 years ago

51

TIL The name "Sri Lanka" does not come from the fact that it is by far the biggest island off India's coast (Lanka just means "island"). The honorific "Sri" came with the independence movement in British Ceylon. So the name doesn't mean "Lord Island" or "Great Island" but rather "Sovreign Island".

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

mx0EY TIL when the Hoover Dam was being drafted, the engineers calculated that it would take 125 years for the concrete to cool if done in a single pour. Instead they poured it in sectioned blocks, some as big as 50 square feet and 5 feet high.
4XKYN TIL that although GPS is free for the world to use, it costs $2 million per day to operate. The money comes from American tax revenue.
M70ma TIL of "gas bag" vehicles developed during the gasoline shortages of the World Wars. They used 'town gas', a by-product of the process of turning coal into cokes.
Wvlo TIL The famous thumbs up from Vault Boy from Fallout is not just a gesture, but a method of measuring radiation from a nuclear blast.
b6p44 TIL the average Black American has roughly 1/4 European ancestry