› added 8 years ago

88

TIL a Pakistani squash player (Jahangir Khan) won 555 matches consecutively, the longest winning streak by any athlete in top-level professional sports as recorded by Guinness World Records.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

VBBJ0 TIL about greek mythological figure Biston, son of Ares. He is considered to have introduced the Thracian practice of tattooing both men and women with eye-like symbols as a magical fetish which was said to be ensuring victory against their neighbouring tribes according to the oracle.
GYdQ5 TIL that during the Black Death, the physician to the Papacy recognized that bloodletting was ineffective, but he continued to prescribe bleeding for members of the Roman Curia, whom he disliked. He also claimed that all true cases of plague were caused by astrological factors, and were incurable
9w7Z7 TIL After the US Navy lost the USS Thresher in 1963, it instituted a quality assurance program called SUBSAFE for its submarines. As a result they went from losing 16 submarines to non-combat reasons in the 48 years before, to losing only the USS Scorpion (which wasn’t SUBSAFE certified) since 1963.
PmKw TIL that inside the conqueror Tamerlane’s tomb in modern day Uzbekistan, it read “Whoever opens my tomb, shall unleash an invader more terrible than I.” Two days after the exhumation of his tomb, the Nazis invaded the USSR.
Yp6Rv TIL the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi were based on the Vietcong guerillas who faced a more technologically advanced foe but originally the events on Endor were to be set on the Wookie home planet. It was changed because Wookies had become technologically skilled over the evolution of the series.