› added 11 years ago

163

TIL that elephants walk on their tiptoes

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via reddit.com

R7Yl9 TIL that General LeMay, responsible for the firebombing of 63 Japanese cities during WW2, said “Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
oBoK TIL “Fido” is a common dog name because it was the name of Abe Lincoln’s dog; the pooch outlived the president, but was eventually stabbed by a drunk man.
9wkDr TIL: The top (summit) of Mt Everest is grey limestone, complete with embedded marine invertebrate fossils (e.g. trilobites). This means that the rock that makes up the top Mt Everest was once underwater.
6EBG8 TIL Chinese and Japanese people are superstitious about numbers, particularly the number four, which is considered unlucky because it sounds like the word for “death.” In California, Chinese and Japanese Americans with chronic heart disease are 27% more likely to die on the 4th day of a given month
PYyMV TIL that during Vostok 4, Russian cosmonaut Pavel Popovich said that he was able to observe thunderstorms from his spacecraft. However, he forgot that the Russian word for thunderstorms was the agreed upon code word for extreme nausea requiring immediate landing, and his mission was cut short.