› added 11 years ago

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TIL Claudette Colvin was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation, 9 months before Rosa Parks, but was not used as a figurehead for the civil rights movement because she was an unmarried, pregnant teenager.

7rJ7Z TIL the Stasi, East Germany's secret police force, employed around 90,000 full-time staff, assisted by around 170,000 unofficial informants and countless other occasional collaborators. It is estimated that there was one agent or informant for every 6.5 people living in the GDR.
e0X6k TIL left-handers can have poor handwriting posture because they write with a “hooked” style when trying to copy how right-handers write, but if they position the paper to their left with the bottom-right edge angled down, then their wrist and arm straightens for neater and more comfortable writing.
0mEy TIL that the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was so fast, the designers did not even consider evasive maneuvers; the pilot was simply instructed to accelerate. This could effectively elude any threat, including surface-to-air missiles.
gMXL9 TIL that if a tail shed by a lizard as a decoy was not eaten by the chasing predator (and the lizard gets away too) the lizard would return to eat its own tail. Turns out the shed tail is a great source of fat to regain the energy lost in its getaway.
kmyg TIL the original voice for Siri was a woman named Susan Bennett. She was paid hourly to record nonsense phrases for a third party company, and only later learned that she had provided Apple with “all of the sounds of the English language”, which they could then formed into any response.