Post * dZlr — Curious Curator

› added 11 years ago

86

TIL that the Oxford English Dictionary was written largely by a murderer from a mental institution

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NXXVP TIL that the central portion of the Jewish bar mitzvah ceremony, reading from the Torah scroll, dates back only to the 18th and 19th century, although the ceremony has ancient roots and the first use of the term was in the 15th century

p8d68 TIL about British Royal Navy pilot Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown, who flew 487 different types of aircraft. This official record will almost certainly never be broken. He also holds several other records including one for most aircraft carrier landings at 2,407.

nMDB TIL London has $248 billion in gold stored in sprawling vaults that contain a fifth of all gold held by the world’s governments.

QNbQX TIL Steven Spielberg told movie stars that if they wanted to work with him, a prerequisite was that they gambled along with him by not taking any salary upfront and instead only taking backend compensation. He said "...if my film makes no money I get no money. They should be prepared to do the same"

nWyP7 TIL that the rarest event ever recorded was the radioactive decay of xenon-124 (an isotope of the element xenon used in flash lamps and ion thrusters in spacecraft), which was detected by a dark matter detector