› added 6 months ago

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TIL the latitudes 30° north and south of the equator are called Horse Latitudes because, back in the day, sailing ships would sometimes threw horses overboard in the sea to conserve water when their ships would stay still for upto weeks in the high-pressure belts with almost no wind activity.

ep0ZD TIL the mineral Lime will glow white after being heated, and that’s the reason for the term “In the limelight”
5Qwk TIL Steven Seagal thought nobody could choke him out, and didn’t respect grappling. So Gene leBell (now 80, the man who taught Bruce Lee grappling), choked him completely unconscious, causing Seagal to soil his pants.
1an0X TIL that JRR Tolkien wrote the Lord of The Rings while he was a visiting English professor at the university in Galway, Ireland. It’s widely believed that the nearby Burren region influenced his depiction of Middle Earth and that “Gollum” was named after a cave in the region called “Poll na gColm”
GYpNJ TIL Australian athlete, Peter Norman, is only now being recognised for his brave actions in the 1968 Olympics. “I’ll stand with you”, he said to Tommie Smith and John Carlos as they raised their fists in one of the most powerful images of all time. However, the Olympic committee ostracised him.
QJ1r6 TIL that after the Salem Witch Trials, the town realised that they had made a mistake and compensated the families of the people they had convicted. More than 200 people had been accused of witchcraft, and 20 of them had been executed.