› added 5 years ago

81

TIL the integral of the secant formula, important in cartography, has been found accidentally when a mathematician was running through numerical approximations known at the time and recognized they matched ln(|tan(phi/2 + pi/4)|). It took 28 more years for someone find a formal proof

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

Gb61 TIL that colic does not mean the baby is fussy or just cries a lot. A baby with colic will cry for at least three hours straight, for more than three days a week, for three weeks in a row. No one is sure of the cause
Roya TIL That English musician David Bowie does not have any recollection of creating his critically acclaimed album,“ Station to Station.” This is because he was in a psychotic state of terror, fueled by an “astronomical” cocaine habit.
xVYDb TIL about Dina Sanichar the true inspiration behind'The Jungle Book'. Found by some hunters in a cave in Bulanshahr, India, Dina was a feral child raised by wolves. Forced to live in a human society for 20 years: couldn't learn how to walk or talk but got addicted to smoking and died of tuberculosis
1aQRD TIL Botum Sakor is the largest national park of Cambodia. Only very little on-location research has been done and published on the biodiversity of the area so far and no scientific investigation has ever been carried out for the remote interior of the park. The human population is unknown
9YMyX TIL that the US had a lesbian First Lady in 1885-1886. She was Rose Cleveland--Grover Cleveland's youngest sister and Acting US First Lady before Grover married in 1886. She was also a lesbian & had a relationship with a wealthy widow, Evangeline Marrs Simpson, with explicitly erotic correspondence.