› added 4 years ago

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TIL Isaac Newton spent 50 years (and wrote 4,500 pages) trying to predict the date for the end of the world using a biblical code. He finally settled on 2060 and this was not known for over 250 years until his papers on the issue were found in a trunk in at the house of the Earl of Portsmouth.

5EyR TIL that the Utah state bird is actually the California Gull because in 1848 the gulls flew in flocks from California to the Salt Lake Valley and consumed tens of thousands of “Mormon Crickets” that were devouring the crops, saving the harvest. It’s called ‘The miracle of the gulls’.
KODKG TIL that a man with a personalized license plate which read "NO PLATE" received 2500 overdue traffic tickets... because they had all been issued to various cars with no plates, and when a car marked "NO PLATE" appeared in the system, the algorithm automatically redirected those tickets to its owner.
OoKQa TIL About a paper which models the expected "time-to-failure" of potential conspiracies. E.g. if the moon landing was a hoax, the conspiracy would have had to involve 411k people, and thus the model posits that the conspiracy would have been exposed within about 4 years
5dgB TIL while most of Noah Webster’s ‘Americanized’ spellings (such as 'center’ and 'color’) caught on, some did not, such as his changing of 'tongue’ to 'tung’.
7rEdZ TIL that Einstein described quantum entanglement as "spuckhafte ferwirklung" or "spooky action at a distance" because it contradicted his Theory of Relativity