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TIL Mount Everest is named after Sir George Everest, even though he had no connection to the mountain and never saw it. He objected to the name because Hindi speakers found it hard to write and pronounce...

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a9vo TIL Newborns’ crying is influenced by native language. In a 2009 study, French infants were shown to cry with a “rising melody contour” while German infants cried with “falling contours”.
GK97 TIL that after the bombing of Hiroshima, there were “ant-walking alligators” that the survivors saw everywhere, men and women who “were now eyeless and faceless — with their heads transformed into blackened alligator hides displaying red holes, indicating mouths.”
groDb TIL about Project Genetrix which was a United States Air Force program designed to launch General Mills manufactured surveillance balloons over China, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to take aerial photographs and collect intelligence.
W6A8 TIL Punxsutawney Phil performs worse at predicting the weather by his shadow than he would by chance
oRnLr TIL The oldest known collection of jokes was created by Philip the 2nd of Macedon, he paid for a social club in Athens to write down its members' jokes (circa 4th century BCE). The oldest joke book we still have is the Philogelos which contains 265 jokes and dates likely to the 4th or 5th century CE