› added 5 years ago

72

TIL In Greek mythology Theseus encountered a bandit named Sinis who would kill travelers by having them help him bend pine trees to the ground, after which he would let go causing them to be catapulted to their deaths.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

wL0xE TIL of the Harvard Sentences, a set of phonetically-balanced words used to test audio quality. It is used to test phone call quality, text-to-speech programming, and more.
LknQr TIL Edgar Rice Burroughs earned just $400 USD for his first published story in 1912. However, 'Tarzan' would become a hit. Burroughs purchased a ranch in California in 1915-1919 & the citizens the community elected to name the city Tarzana, California.
e0kPL TIL that a Toddler’s life was saved by his aunt, after she noticed a white glow in one of his eyes in a photo- it was a cancerous tumour. From a photo album, his mother realised that the glow had been there his entire life. After 4 months of chemotherapy, the cancer went dormant.
l7nOA TIL of the funerary practice of hanging coffins by the extinct Bo people - ethnic minorities in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces of China. About 100 of these wooden coffins were attached to stakes driven into the rock of a 600 meters high cliff.
QGlX TIL that it is a myth that Albert Einstein failed maths as a student: “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus”