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TIL A&W tried to capitalize on the success of the Quarter Pounder by introducing a 1/3 pound burger in the 1980s. Despite being larger and outperforming the Quarter Pounder in blind taste tests, the 1/3 pounder failed because consumers didn’t know that 1/3 was bigger than ¼.

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MoZV TIL 10-18 million Africans were taken by Arab slavers. This is more than the 12 million Africans shipped in the Atlantic slave trade, and 16-30 times more than the 600,000 slaves imported to America since 1620, which is less than the more than 1 million whites enslaved by Ottoman vassals.
1aKA4 TIL the McDonald's Big Mac was invented by franchisee Jim Delligatti in Pittsburgh, PA. It had two previous names: the Aristocrat and Blue Ribbon Burger. It was first sold in 1967 and nationwide the following year.
QA8k TIL the little girl who sang “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” actually got one, thanks to a newspaper campaign. She gave it to the local zoo and it lived there for 47 years.
0QkN TIL the False Positive Paradox describes a situation where a “highly accurate” test is worthless if the testing condition is rare enough. Example: If 10 people in a city of 20 million are “bad guys” and a surveillance program identifies them with 99% accuracy, then 99.995% of positives will be false
R7vl7 TIL that American long-distance open-water swimmer Lynne Cox is known for being the first person to swim the 2.5 miles between the United States and the Soviet Union, via the Bering Strait. She was jointly congratulated by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.