› added 5 years ago

75

TIL that it currently takes more information to obtain a library card than to form a US company

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5YbOr TIL the US President uses a different pen to sign each piece of legislation. Each pen itself becomes a historical artifact and becomes a gift to be offered to those who helped create that piece of history.
kJABm TIL: Local Indonesian mythology says that Orangutans actually have the ability to speak human languages, but choose not to, fearing they would be forced to get jobs and work if were they ever caught.
e0wOn TIL Soviets were so helpless against the SR71-"Blackbird" that Reagan sent some to secret Soviet meetings, creating sonic booms and drawing figure eights over, letting them know they were being watched and can't do a thing about it.
mxNYy TIL that Swedish blood banks texts donors to notify them whenever their blood helps save a life.
OoGOX The sky appears blue for a combination of two reasons. Before white light reaches the Earth's surface, the light waves collide with and bounce off of the nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere. Different frequencies of light (in other words different colours) are scattered differently. Higher frequencies (blue and purple) are more easily scattered and thus bounce around in all different directions more than lower frequencies (red or orange) do. The scattering of high frequencies alone would cause the sky to appear blue and purple, but our eyes work better at frequencies near the middle of the spectrum (yellow and green). Since the colour blue is closer to yellow or green than purple is, the sky we see appears blue.