› added 7 years ago

334

TIL in 1989 murderer Michael Godwin had his sentence reduced to life imprisonment after five years awaiting the electric chair but was electrocuted accidentally while sitting naked on a steel toilet seat in his cell. While trying to fix his television set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.

Read more alphahistory.com

via reddit.com

PmDG TIL that writing was likely only invented from scratch three times in history: in the Middle East, China, and Central America. All other alphabets and writing systems were either derived from or inspired by the the others, or were too incomplete to fully express the spoken language.
woZx1 TIL for whom the bell tolls does not mean that the dead cant hear the bells
9wWaD TIL about ternary plots. You can visualise 3 quantities on a 2d triangular graph if they add up to a constant (eg. soil components or colour composition). One graph is “x+y+z=1” which makes a triangle on positive axes, with the regular 3d gridlines intersecting to form triangular ones in the graph.
loRl1 TIL the Japanese names for Jessie and James from Pokémon are Musashi and Kojiro, respectively. This is a reference to renowned Japanese swordsmen Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro, who fought a famous duel in 1612.
N7mWJ TIL Charlotte Whitton was a Canadian feminist and mayor of Ottawa. She was the first woman mayor of a major city in Canada, serving from 1951 to 1956 and again from 1960 to 1964. Whitton was a Canadian social policy pioneer, leader and commentator, as well as a journalist and writer.