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1026

TIL the abbreviation “lb” for pound comes from the ancient Roman unit of measure “libra pondo”, meaning “a pound by weight”, which is also why we ended up calling it a “pound”.

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m1Y5v TIL black widow spiders are not aggressive — you often have to actually pinch or squeeze one to get it to attack — but their venom makes bites extremely painful to humans, and to small animals like mice, fatal.
yQeye TIL that if the genealogy of the early Germanic chroniclers is true, Queen Elizabeth II is descended from the god Odin
ELr0 TIL that hammerhead sharks can reproduce asexually, one of the few animals to have that ability
R5r54 TIL: Palantir Technologies' Name and Logo are derived from the Palantir Seeing Stones from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
PYagG TIL of the Harvard Jail House, which was put on sale by accident. Robert Pinckney bought the jailhouse for $1.50 and successfully sued the town for rent when they continued putting criminals in there. He then sold the place to Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist’s dummy, for $10,000 in war bonds.