› added 10 years ago

90

TIL that Europeans traditionally swam the breaststroke, while Native Americans swam the front crawl. When two Native Americans won an 1844 swimming competition in England, newspapers criticized their barbaric, “un-European” form. Europeans refused to use the faster front crawl for decades.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

WknVX TIL about En Passant in chess where you can capture a pawn that has moved two squares from its starting square as if it had advanced only one square.
oRp87 TIL that Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine is buried right next to Marilyn Monroe in Westwood Memorial Park. He paid $75,000 back in 1992 to secure the spot. He told the LA Times, "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is a opportunity too sweet to pass up."
XbaD TIL the airplane which was featured in The Dark Knight Rises’ plane scene actually crashed with no survirors a year after the film was released
GYn75 TIL that some scientists theorize that the origin of life is just the inevitable outcome of thermodynamics as a middle-step to increase overall entropy in the universe.
mxkbp TIL The Stella Shouting Contest happens in New Orleans every year to commemorate Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire