› added 6 years ago

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TIL During ancient Roman times, the iconic marble sculptures weren't actually white. They were actually painted and have just lost their paint over the hundreds of years.

gMayA Around 1 million people in Ireland—as well as 20,000 people in the United States—can speak Irish. It’s an ancient and unfamiliar-looking language in the Celtic group, making it a linguistic cousin of other ancient languages like Welsh, Scots, Manx, and Breton. To English speakers though, it’s a tough language to master. It has a relatively complex grammar that sees words inflected in an array of different contexts ignored in English. It uses a different word order from English that places the verb, rather than the subject, at the head of the clause. And it uses an alphabet traditionally comprising just 18 letters, so words are often pronounced completely differently from what an English speaker might expect.
oBpLE TIL the United States only lost 1 of its first 50 conflicts. Every other war was either a US victory or had no clear victor. The first official defeat was in Red Cloud's War (1866) against the Lakota Tribe. Since then, the US has lost 5 out of 65 conflicts, for a total 95% win rate.
XRjE TIL U.S. nuclear testing in the Bikini Atoll dislocated natives to an island 1/6 its size. Each native gets $550/year as compensation.
M76eb TIL there are glaciers in tropical Indonesia.
VMjkQ TIL that in Germany they have installed these "Stolpersteins" (stumbling blocks), that have the biographical information of the victims of the Nazis. Their intent is to remind people of the victims of their Nazi past in a manner that does not glorify those events.