› added 11 years ago

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TIL that the symbols on the first Playstation controllers actually had a purpose. Triangle: A Person’s Viewpoint, Square: A Map, Circle: Yes, and X: No. It was assumed that games released on this console would mostly use controls based on the meanings of these symbols.

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via reddit.com

w9KJ TIL The Republic of Liberia began as a settlement of the American Colonization Society, who believed African Americans would face better chances for freedom in Africa than in the United States.
LkOPp TIL a Cuneiform clay tablet made in 703 BC, copied from an astronomers notebook from 3100 BCE, is evidence that Sodom and Gomorrah were actually destroyed by a 1 km wide asteroid that then went on to hit Austria.
v1Q58 TIL about Luis Pardo Villalón, the chilean Navy officer who commanded the rescue of the Endurance crew. He had never sailed to Antarctica before, but the chilean government sent him aboard the Yelcho, to rescue the 22 stranded men on Elephant Island, after Ernest Shackleton made it to land.
16vn4 TIL Ironically, Hypoglycemia is one of the serious complications of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and even leads to death.
XrG8 TIL in the 1950s, a married duo had a live BBC radio program where the husband would seemingly transmit telepathic messages from the studio to his wife who was in a different location each episode (underwater, in a plane, etc) and would then repeat it back. Even now, it is unknown how this was done.