› added 11 years ago

148

TIL when Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize, Atlanta threw him a dinner party that was almost cancelled due to opposition. Coca-Cola’s CEO threatened to move the company out of Atlanta since he thought it was embarrassing that the city’s people wouldn’t honor their Nobel Prize winner.

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x6eK1 TIL that during the Edo period in Japan Catholicism was outlawed and groups of Japanese catholics had secret rooms in their houses and they made statues of the Virgin Mary and other saints that would look like Buddhist statues
PYELn TIL that Fema sometimes measures disasters impact using a thing called the waffle house index. This is because there are so many of them and they have the unique ability to operate completely off gas for power/heat/cook. So if the waffle house is closed then its tantamount to complete disaster!
y0Vp TIL Orlando, a ginger cat, competed and won against stock-picking professionals at the stock market. The cat picked at random, while the professionals used traditional stock-picking methods. At the end of the year, the cat had £542.60 profit, compared to the professionals’ £176.60 profit.
kpo1 TIL the United States military is testing - a laser cannon that can be directed by an Xbox controller, an electromagnetic rail gun that can be placed on future tanks, and a ‘smart’ sniper rifle that can measure variables like wind conditions.
1xw4 TIL - Most of the smoke billowing up from a space shuttle launch is not exhaust. It is water vapor from the pool of water under the shuttle designed to absorb the acoustic shock waves that could otherwise tear the shuttle apart.