› added 5 years ago

83

TIL Hawaii's black sand beaches were created instantaneously when hot lava shattered as it reached the sea.

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RJpQ TIL Neopets was originally aimed at college students who couldn’t have pets in their dorms
8aKgb TIL Quarantine is from Italian 'quaranta giorni', meaning "forty days", used in 14th-15th-century Venetian dialect and designating the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic
R7LP4 TIL In the United States, in a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day.
5YWlR TIL had it not been for the Norman Conquest of 1066, the English we speak today would have been much different and more restrictive. The merging of Old English and Norman French led to Modern English being sort of hybrid of the two, giving another shade of meaning to words such as "swine" vs "pork".
kO0xg TIL Goodhart's Law, the principle that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. For example, when a government tries to bring down unemployment figures to demonstrate how well the economy is doing, unemployment figures stop being a good measure of the economy.