› added 2 years ago

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TIL airline ticket pricing is so convoluted, it's mathematically impossible to create an algorithm to select the best price for a flight (the problem is undecidable)

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xVj70 TIL that on the Mississippi River in the 1850s, the word "two" was often pronounced "twain." When leadsmen measured a depth of two fathoms, they shouted "mark twain!" The American writer Mark Twain, a former river pilot from Missouri, got his pen name from this phrase.
WZRo TIL Hitler had a pet alligator(Mississippi alligator), named Saturn, now age 85, that Russians were gifted by British government and it still lives and can be seen in Moscow Zoo.
J16B4 TIL that Robert Lopez is the youngest person to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, is the only person to have won each of them multiple times, and has won them closer together than anyone else.
Lk1dr TIL of "promession", an elaborate decomposition system that takes a body, freezes it, vibrates it to dust, and dehydrates it, to result in the most eco-friendly form of burial ever devised.
PY6QJ TIL Archduke Ferdinand survived an initial assassination attempt on the day he was killed when a grenade bounced off his convertible. He escaped unharmed, but later wanted to visit the wounded and that is when his car stalled next to one of the assassins, who happened to be nearby.