› added 2 months ago

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TIL Nikola Tesla believed he received extraterrestrial signals in 1899 during experiments in Colorado. In 1901 he wrote he may have heard “the greeting of one planet to another” and thought the signals came from Mars long before radio astronomy existed.

Read more chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

via reddit.com

Y78Dr TIL Edmund Hillary (first person to summit Mt Everest) was scheduled to serve as a guide for a flight over Antarctica on Air New Zealand Flight 901, but canceled to instead embark on a US speaking tour. Flight 901 ended up crashing into Mt Erebus, killing all onboard.
W76DL TIL that in Tok Pisin, the English-based creole language spoken by millions in Papua New Guinea, the vocabularly is often unrecognizably shifted in meaning from English, for example: "as ples" [ass place -> place of origin], "maus gras" [mouth grass -> moustache], or "belhat" [belly hot -> angry]
QLwE TIL a Japanese clerk broke the record for solving a complex math problem when he correctly calculated the sum of 15 numbers that were shown to him in 1.7 seconds……using an imaginary abacus.
X0XPD TIL of mouth puffing, which is when patients continued to try mouth breathing during sleep even after their mouths had been taped shut
kLO4 TIL students from Johns Hopkins took advantage of their professor’s test curve by unanimously boycotting the final. They all received 100s.