› added 10 years ago

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TIL that ‘Tommy Boy’ is actually an update of Shakespeare’s 'Hamlet’: Tommy is the Prince, his father dies, his mother (Bo Derek) is Gertrude, in reality married to his “step brother” (Rob Lowe) who is Claudius. David Spade’s character is Horatio.

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VBBrk TIL that time dilation is the reason we can use muon tomography to scan the Great Pyramids. From their point of view, muons only live a very short time. But they go so fast that from our point of view, they live long enough to penetrate the atmosphere and large objects.
09R5 TIL of a little-known French law that if you were born in one of the USA states that was created from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 or any other former French territory, the five-year waiting period for french citizenship may be waived.
b68vp TIL that during the Habsburg monarchy, belief in vampires was so widespread that Empress Maria Theresa sent her personal physician Gerard van Swieten to officially investigate. He concluded that vampires did not exist, leading her to specifically outlaw all forms of "anti-vampire" corpse desecration
xVkpb TIL: The introduction of wolves into Yellowstone in 1995 had huge beneficial effects on the environment, including changing the flow of rivers and streams.
WGm8 TIL that the term “football” did not originally have anything to do with kicking a ball with your feet, but instead meant that a game was played on foot as opposed to on a horse, and hence was a game for “commoners”