› added 1 week ago

7

TIL that the U.S. once accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on North Carolina in 1961, and only one tiny safety switch prevented a nuclear explosion.

Read more dncr.nc.gov

via reddit.com

VMb8Q TIL of the term Fellow Traveller, used to refer to people who sympathize with the ideology of an organization and cooperate with it, but are not members of it.
dDjmZ TIL: Robert Fisher was convicted after defrauding Xerox in a toner ink scam in which they acquired $25 million worth of ink toner to resell for $11 million to a person in Miami. Fisher has to pay the IRS 192k due to filing false tax reports.
r60o TIL: Saying “Ahi tuna” is redundant. The Hawaiian word “Ahi” means yellowfin tuna.
Oo77 TIL that a 10th-century Arab explorer in Russia witnessed a Viking funeral rite in which a slave girl had sex with each of the tribe’s warriors before they ritualistically sacrificed her to serve their fallen chieftain in the afterlife.
mx6kv TIL Tolkein popularised "dwarves" as the plural of "dwarf" to differentiate his fantasy dwarves from humans with dwarfism, for whom the correct plural was "dwarfs". The dwarf trope became so entrenched that "dwarves" is now widely recognised as the standard plural of "dwarf" even for humans