› added 1 year ago

120

TIL that Diedrich Knickerbocker, a pseudonym used by writer Washington Irving in his satirical first novel A History of New York, inspired the name used to describe Dutch settlers, Manhattanites, and a type of baggy trousers, along with the name of the New York Knicks NBA team.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

xxMD TIL two 16 year old girls in West Virginia murdered their best friend by stabbing her over 50 times because they got tired of being her friend.
r76M TIL there’s a line of 70 foot long concrete arrows that bisects the country longitudinally all the way from San Francisco to New York City. They’re from the pre-digital age and were installed by the Federal gov’t in 1924 with 50’ tall towers with rotating gas-powered lights to aid lost pilots.
8apnG TIL while 95% of U.S. adults support organ donation, only 54% are actually signed up as donors.
gr7Py TIL that Carl Sagan has an archive in the Library of Congress, endowed by the creator of Family Guy. Seth MacFarlane put up an undisclosed sum to help the Library of Congress buy more than a thousand boxes of material kept by the late scientist and his wife and collaborator, Ann Druyan.
XyLD TIL that curly hair is curly because the hair follicle it grows from is oval and straight hair is straight because the hair follicle it grows from is round. Straight hair is like a straw (except tinier) and curly hair is like a slightly squeezed tip of a straw.