› added 10 years ago

586

TIL the actual odds of 100 monkeys with typewriters randomly writing Shakespeare’s Hamlet are 1 in 36 x 10 to the 169,541st power.

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e0BgE TIL Vietnam is building its first 2 metro systems: one in Hanoi (capital) with Chinese funding/money and the other in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) with Japanese expertise. Hanoi's is progressing more quickly but has had multiple accidents, one deadly. HCM City's has had more delays but no accidents.
p8EXG TIL that firing squads would always have one gun shooting a blank. This ensures that no one in the group is able to know for sure which of them fired the fatal round, deterring some of the guilt.
78y8r TIL that the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois are at the largest pre-Colombian city in North America. At it's peak in 1100 CE, the city covered 6 square miles and housed upwards of 15,000 inhabitants. Indigenous people today, including the Cherokee and Choctaw, continue these mound-building traditions.
M4nB TIL Stephen King hated the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film version of The Shining stating; “Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film.”
4RyX TIL that Mughal emperor Shah Jahan got rid of the scaffolding on the Taj Mahal by telling peasants that any of the scaffolding material they took was theirs to keep. Apparently they took it away in a single night.