› added 5 years ago

371

TIL: The US dropped a total of 67 nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands

x67x0 TIL Italy has a dozen or so spoken languages, not dialects, although Italians often refer to them as such. Many predate the Italian language, and some are of Germanic and Slavonic origin. While Italian is Italy's national language and spoken by most, many speak their "dialect" in their region.
b68A0 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.
9YbpB TIL that in 2002, President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone made Bengali an honrary Official Language in recognition of the efforts made by Bangladeshi Soldiers in keeping peace during the Civil War.
Wk0YL TIL that Andre Geim won the parodistic Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on using magnetism to levitate a frog. 10 years later, his experiments regarding graphene won him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. This makes him the only ever recipient of both the Ig Nobel and Nobel Prizes.
R7Qp4 TIL: Before the trial of Soviet politicians Zinoviev and Kamenev, they had agreed to plead guilty to the false charges on the condition that they not be executed, a condition that Stalin accepted, stating "that goes without saying". A few hours after their conviction, Stalin ordered their execution