› added 4 years ago

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TIL Numbered musical notation is popular in China, making conventions to encode and decode music more accessible than in the West, as more Chinese can sight read it than standard notation. Indexing with numbers makes it possible to search music by melody, but it has never become popular in the West

ey1k TIL that Stephen Hawking’s wife was given the option to take him off of life support after he was placed in a medically induced coma. She refused, and upon recovering he finished writing ‘A Brief History of Time’
0Jdy TIL that in Georgia there is an airtight room, sealed in 1940, called the Crypt of Civilization. It contains numerous artifacts documenting what life was like at the time of sealing, and is scheduled to be opened in the year AD 8113.
mxjdp TIL that 12pt Courier is the standard font for film script writing because it's a fixed-width font meaning letters have equal spaces between them, so 55 lines on a page equals about a minute of screen time
GDON TIL the mercury everyone is so scared of in vaccines (thimerosal) is actually ethylmercury, while the toxic mercury which can damage the nervous system is methylmercury. The same way that we drink ethylalcohol (ethanol) but methylalcohol (methanol) will cause you to go blind, or just plain kill you.
VkNQ TIL that in 2002, when Bruce Willis’s daughter suggested he buy girl scout cookies for troops, Willis responded by buying 12,000 cookies and sending them to sailors and soldiers in the Middle East.