› added 6 years ago

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TIL that in 16th and 17th Century Denmark, merchant ship captains had to pay a toll based on the value of the goods on the ship. The value was declared by the captain. The Danish authorities could take the value based toll (1-2%) or opt to buy the cargo for the declared value.

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QNaRp Today I learned the first US Woman to be an Electrical Engineer (Edith Clarke, born 1883) designed the massive Hoover Dam turbine systems
d0g7 TIL Joe Rogan was the Massachusetts full contact Tae Kwon Do champion for four consecutive years. By the age of 19, Rogan won the US Open Tae Kwon Do Championship and as lightweight champion went on to beat both the middle and heavyweight title-holders to obtain the Grand Championship.
5YZlr TIL An anthropologist created the language "Beama" for the film Alpha, about a young man separated from his tribe who befriends a wolf 20,000 years ago. She explored the research on phonetic sounds of protolanguages to determine how Beama should sound, and the director preferred more melodic-sounds
17KP TIL there’s about 10 times the amount of water inside the earth, as there is in all the oceans, lakes, rivers, and glaciers on the surface.
yQxJp TIL during WWII the British planned to build a giant aircraft carrier out of ice (actually a wood pulp/ice mix) to protect the convoys in the Atlantic from German U boats. The project ended owing to rising costs and the development of longer-range aircraft that closed the gap in air coverage.