› added 1 year ago

39

Today I learned of the voiceless labial–velar implosive, the rarest sound to appear in any language. The sound, described as pronouncing a k and p at the same time while sucking in air instead of pushing it out, is found only in the Central dialect of the Igbo language.

newRG TIL of Randy Gardner, a 17 year-old high school student from San Diego who set the record for the longest time a human has gone without sleep (11 days, 25 min). Gardner's experimental analysis found paranoia, hallucinations, loss of concentration, and being unable to count backwards from 100.
y90w TIL that if you are INVOLUNTARILY bumped off your flight, U.S. airlines are required to give you cash or a check of the one-way fare to your destination equal to 200% of that amount if you arrive 1 to 2 hours late on next flight. More than 2 hours gets you 400%.
XE4e8 TIL that Weird Al Yankovic's parents died in 2004 of carbon monoxide poisoning. He played a show in Appleton, WI the same day, saying "Since my music had helped many of my fans through tough times, maybe it would work for me as well."
rXg0 TIL the orange colour of the carrot was result of Dutch cultivation in the 17th Century, when patriotic growers turned a vegetable which was then purple into the colour of the national flag
16ZnP TIL Bram stoker's notes for Dracula contain little research into Vlad the Impaler. Much of the modern relation to Vlad the Impaler rely on Raymond McNally's 1972 book, In Search of Dracula. Dracula may have been more based on the repeatedly killed Abhartach of Irish folklore.