› added 11 years ago

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TIL We see the colors that we do because that is just about the only spectrum of light that passes through water, the area where eyes first evolved. There hasn’t been any evolutionary reason on land to see any broader spectrum.

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7r0NX TIL Steve Jobs presented the first Macintosh with a Japanese painting because he was inspired by Zen Buddhism and his love of Japanese cuisine, but there was another lesser-known facet of Jobs' interest in Japanese culture: he was an ardent fan and collector of shin-hanga, or modern woodcuts.
Z80bR TIL that the Chowchilla kidnappers -who locked 26 children and their bus driver in a buried moving van- never got to make their ransom demands, since the phone lines to the police were occupied by worried parents and the media calling in. The victims then dug themselves out and escaped.
m0EM TIL when Jai Singh, Maharaja of a princely state of India, visited the Rolls-Royce showroom in London, he was affronted when the salesman implied that he couldn’t afford to purchase the car. He purchased ten, shipped them to India, and ordered to use them for collecting and transporting garbage.
NRw1 TIL the KKK didn’t originally burn crosses. It wasn’t until they were portrayed doing so in the 1915 silent film “Birth of a Nation” that the real KKK actually started doing it.
bE70 TIL that wristwatches were almost exclusively worn by women, men used pocket-watches. Wristwatches were first worn by military men towards the end of the 19th century as a way to synchronise maneuvers during war without revealing the plan to the enemy through signaling.