› added 1 week ago

1

TIL that the 'do' in do-re-mi was originally called 'ut' until the music theorist Giovanni Doni renamed it, ostensibly as an abbreviation of Dominus but some academics suspect that he named it after himself

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m1J7P TIL that the controversy over the infamous 1927 Long Count Fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey between partially stemmed from the fact that a 1912 law had banned the transportation of boxing movies across state lines, meaning few people could see the footage of it.
6E0DY TIL that "Billion" is the European name for "Trillion" in the US (10^12) and "Trillion" is the European name for "Quintillion" in the US (10^18).
kJY6e TIL male genital transplant surgeons exclude the testicles because the deceased organ donor would be the biological father with regard to future pregnancies
a1pM TIL that HAL9000 in the 2001: A Space Odyssey sings “Daisy, Daisy…” when he gets turned off beacuse it was the first song ever to be sang by a computer (in 1961 by IBM7094)
X0XNR TIL that David Carradine died in a hotel room in Bangkok, the reported result of autoerotic asphyxiation - the intentional restriction of oxygen for sexual pleasure. His family and agent believed that Carradine was murdered.