› added 4 months ago

20

TIL : You Can Call 112 from Any Mobile Phone, Even Without a SIM Card, and It Will Connect You to Emergency Services Worldwide

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YpxZZ TIL about Stella, a dog who communicates with her owners using a sound board preprogrammed with her favourite words. Recently her “beach” button broke, so she instead used the buttons for “water” “outside” and “help” to communicate that she wanted to press the beach button and couldn’t.
5YJkQ TIL Stephen Hawking was still working on "Brief Answers to the Big Questions" with questions like "Is there a God?" when he died. To fill the gaps, the publishers used Hawking’s “enormous personal archive” and completed the book with his academic colleagues, his family, and personal estate
4kr1b TIL a priest who opposed communism lived in a US embassy for 15 years straight, never leaving once, because it was the only place he was protected from the Red Army.
X0XLD TIL that artist Margaret Keane had her work plagiarized by her own husband for over 10 years. After winning her court case and leaving her husband, her notably sad and gloomy artwork took on a much happier style.
VBJbk TIL a "bit" is equal to 12.5¢, and since the US has no coin worth a bit, "two-bit" (equal to one quarter) became a way of describing something cheap or unworthy, as in "two-bit hustler" or "two-bit operation."