Post * lOGa — Curious Curator

› added 10 years ago

87

TIL that Native Americans may have been called Indians not because Europeans thought were from India, but because Columbus remarked on their gentleness and called them “una gente in Dios” (Spanish for “people of God”). The ’s’ was dropped and Indio became Indian.

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694YY TIL: In 1962, a bear caused a false alarm at a US air base and almost caused nuclear war

eOJg TIL: The President of Belarus introduced a new law in 2014 that prohibits collective farm workers from leaving their jobs willingly. He later admitted that the law is very much like medieval serfdom.

JYr8v TIL about an engineering principle called the "Bathtub Curve". It suggests all products have 3 phases of reliability: An early high failure rate that decreases as defects are removed, a period showing intrinsic (random) failure rate, and then an increase in failures as wearout occurs.

Y5JG TIL: The antechinus, a mouse-like animal, has so much sex that it disintegrates. They are known as semelparous, meaning that sex is a once-in-a-lifetime affair that is usually fatal.

XEXr8 TIL Pablo Escobar, The Cocaine Kingpin, said that one of his first illegal enterprises was robbing tombstones from local graveyards, sanding down the names, and selling them to Panamanian smugglers.