› added 12 years ago

82

TIL that in the U.S. you can theoretically sue someone and then challenge them to trial by combat to decide who is liable.

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epOob TIL that Nicolas Cage bought a haunted mansion in New Orleans called the LaLaurie Mansion. This place has a super creepy history with torture and murder from the 1800s. Cage got it in 2007, but then it got foreclosed just two years later.
ApGw TIL Russia contains several “Closed Cities”. These cities’ existence are denied by the government and their location is unknown. All foreigners are prohibited from visiting them and these cities do not appear on any maps or road signs.
VWo4 TIL fresh snow can reflect 80% of UV light and can cause “snow blindness” which is a painful sunburn on your eyeball
6Lpl TIL that pink dolphins are just sun burnt albino dolphins
gje7 TIL that in Quake III Arena, when developers needed to calculate x^(-½), one used a piece of code and the hexadecimal number 0x5f3759df to calculate it about 4 times faster than floating-point division. It was so strange another developer commented in the code “what the fuck?”