› added 6 years ago

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TIL That ACME in the Looney Tunes Cartoons was supposed to be ironic. Acme comes from a Greek word meaning "pinnacle" or "peak" implying "the peak of greatness" and that the product would be the best you could get. Any product with the name in the show was guaranteed to fail spectacularly.

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MaM0 TIL - Circuit breakers halt trading on the nation’s stock markets during dramatic drops and are set at 7%, 13%, and 20% of the closing price for the previous day.
j00N TIL Pluto’s largest moon Charon was named after James W. Christy’s wife, Charlene. It was later discovered that Charon was an existing figure in Greek mythology (the ferryman of Hades, later known as Pluto), and thus the name was kept.
woPJ8 TIL Euthanasia for patients with dementia is legal in Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
N70X8 TIL Julie Andrews initially refused the role of Mary Poppins because she was pregnant. Walt Disney however insisted that she played the nanny, saying, "We'll wait for you."
WyNA TIL that Dean Karnazes ran for 350 miles nonstop, over three sleepless nights … just because he felt like trying to.