› added 6 days ago

4

TIL modern horseshoe crabs have been around for 250 million years, with little morphological change during this time.

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Z89av TIL that computer science was actually promoted to women in the 1960s - on the premise that the planning and attention to detail involved in programming is akin to that of planning a dinner party.
Z8RQR TIL large pepper grinders are named "Rubirosas" after Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat and playboy who had a reputedly humungous penis
p8N1e TIL the quirks in the French numerical system ("four-twenty-ten-nine") are a legacy of the base 20 numerical system used by the Celtics. The hybridization with the base 10 system came with the Roman conquest of the Gaul.
JJZl TIL that Marilyn vos Savant received nearly 1,000 letters of complaint with signatures bearing PhDs after (correctly) stating that choosing to switch doors in the Monty Hall Problem would double the chances of winning.
BrGad TIL that Canada didn't burn the White House, rather it was British troops fresh from warring Napoleon's Army, stationed in Bermuda, who set fire to Washington DC.