› added 9 months ago

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TIL that back in 1994, Chinese arms smugglers with ties to major manufacturers tried to sell AK-47s and even heavier weaponry to U.S. street gangs

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rvPw TIL the easiest languages to learn for English speakers are Afrikaans, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese & Romanian. This is based on the amount of time it takes for the US Foreign Service to train their diplomats before entering service abroad.
jmVN TIL Antarctic explorers would lure penguins to their ship to be eaten by playing musical instruments. When a bagpipe was played, the penguins fled in terror.
wodYW TIL that when Bank of America was originally founded in 1904, it was called the "Bank of Italy" because it was created to serve the needs of the Italian immigrant community in San Francisco.
5YZlr TIL An anthropologist created the language "Beama" for the film Alpha, about a young man separated from his tribe who befriends a wolf 20,000 years ago. She explored the research on phonetic sounds of protolanguages to determine how Beama should sound, and the director preferred more melodic-sounds
vPRxB TIL I learned for the Voyager program engineers computed 10,000 potential trajectories. This was done not only to optimize the journey but also avoid having voyager reach a planet at Christmas or Thanksgiving time.