› added 4 years ago

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TIL of the groundscraper, the opposite of a skyscraper, which is a building like the Pentagon or Apple's headquarters with relatively few stories but greatly extends horizontally.

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8e9EZ TIL The Sphinx was buried in sand around 400 years after it was built, roughly 4500 years ago. In 1400 BC, Thutmose IV attempted to unbury the Sphinx but only managed to uncover its front paws. It would not be fully unburied until 1887 AD, meaning the Sphinx was mostly buried for nearly 4000 years.
XEZm6 TIL that during a 1969 TV screening of the British Royal Family's life, more than 30 million people tuned in. During intermission, so many toilets were flushed simultaneously over England that it caused a water shortage.
xg4o TIL In 1965, The World Health Organisation stopped calling Down Syndrome “mongoloids” due to a delegate from Mongolia
7EaO TIL that Guillermo del Toro desperately wanted to direct Breaking Bad’s episode “Ozymandias”. When he expressed this desire to the episode’s eventual director Rian Johnson, Johnson responded, “Yeah, sorry, I’m the one who gets to f*** the prom queen.”
kO6ae TIL that the reason the speed of light is EXACTLY 299,792,458 metres per second is that the metre is technically defined by international agreement as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second.