› added 1 week ago

3

TIL about beating the bounds. Townsfolk in England, Wales, and the US gather and hit local landmarks with sticks. In the past, young boys would be whipped and even be violently pushed into boundary stones. This was to help memorize the boundaries of a community in a time before maps were common.

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pxJ8 TIL that since there is no red light 30 ft under the water, blood looks green. If you go even deeper, blood color may change from green to black.
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8a6R8 TIL that in the 1952 polio epidemic in Denmark, mortality was over 85 per cent due to a shortage of respirators. Dr Bjorn Ibsen invented a new kind of ventilator, proved it worked and then recruited thousands of volunteers to hand-pump them for weeks (they were fully manual). Mortality fell to 26%.
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