› added 3 years ago

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TIL Karate changed it's spelling from 唐手 to 空手, changing it's meaning from "Chinese hand" to "empty hand" (both are pronounced karate). This was because of Japanese militarism, they wanted to conceal the fact that it developed under the influence of Chinese kung fu.

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Bryor TIL that despite discovering the cure for scurvy as early as 1497 by Vasco de Gama's crew, it was repeatedly forgotten, discredited, 'rediscovered' and messed around for hundreds of years despite scientific research. It continued killing people till Vitamin C was finally isolated in 1932
DQwWg TIL that a retired print technician from Yorkshire David Smith in 2023 discovered the Einstein tile, a single tile that is capable of tiling the plane aperiodically thereby solving a long standing open problem in mathematics.
Ab1x TIL Jon Stewart and his wife founded an animal sanctuary in New Jersey to rescue abused factory farm animals
w0MJ TIL that silent reading wasn’t common prior to the 4th century, and that Saint Ambrose was one of the first people to practise it.
b6enE TIL a housing project called Cabrini green had a long history of gangs using sniper rifles to shoot people from high level floors and roof tops spanning from the late 60s to the 1990s