› added 7 years ago

44

TIL Tanks are called tanks because, when they were introduced in WWI, the British were trying to fool the Germans into thinking the weapons were water carriers for the Middle Eastern front of the war.

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8mMV TIL When two New Zealand trawlers came across a Japanese submarine that outweighed them by more than 1000 tons, the two Kiwi trawlers kept ramming it until they beached the much larger sub. This allowed the U.S. to capture key Japanese codebooks
GYJgg TIL Matthew Broderick and John Cusack both passed on the role of Walter White in Breaking Bad. (The network executives didn't want Bryan Cranston until seeing his X-Files episode)
j6jXp TIL that Australia’s Mount Wingen has been burning for 6,000 years. A lightning strike or brush fire ignited a coal seam there around 4000 B.C., and it’s been smoldering ever since.
EWao TIL there’s a compression algorithm that shrinks text to half the size of what popular compressors can achieve, but it takes 1000x more time and 30x more RAM. It shrinks Wikipedia to 1/8 its size, takes 3 days per Gb.
xVP5k TIL the Chicago Tunnel Company once sold naturally cool tunnel air to theaters above the tunnels as an early form of air conditioning