› added 8 years ago

285

TIL… there is a banana plantation in Iceland, just 177 miles from the Arctic Circle

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via reddit.com

R5Vj TIL that it was only last year that Russia acknowledged beer as an alcoholic beverage. Before then, any drink under 10% volume was considered a soft drink.
VM6e0 TIL Tailfins for cars only stuck around for a little over a decade. It started first as pointy little nubs and then as big fins peaking in 1959 with Cadillac producing the most iconic pair of tailfins ever
DQwrp TIL All of Nicholas Sparks’ books (author of The Notebook) have been New York Times bestsellers.
x6ob0 TIL: The word "bee" in Spelling Bee came from the context of communal labor (sewing bee, quilting bee, etc) like bees in a hive. It then developed to mean a social gathering for any specific purpose.
wLv8M TIL: A programmable HP-65 calculator was used as a backup in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, in case the main system malfunctioned.