› added 5 years ago

169

TIL about Crimson Contagion. A simulation from January to August 2019 that tested the capacity of the U.S. federal government. The exercise involves a scenario in which tourists returning from China spread a respiratory virus in the United States.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

oMwL TIL Walt Disney bought his parents a house with a broken furnace which was inadequately fixed by Studio repairmen, causing his mother to die of asphyxiation
LOvr TIL in the early 1900s, a Kansas doctor performed over 16,000 procedures replacing impotent men’s testicles with goat testicles, believing it would not only restore their sexual virility, but also cure 27 other ailments, ranging from dementia to emphysema to flatulence.
Rkjj TIL that Ernest Hemingway grew paranoid and talked about FBI spying on him later in life. He was treated with electroshock. It was later revealed that he was in fact watched, and Edgard Hoover personally placed him under survelliance.
W5Ko TIL In Ancient Rome, flaming war pigs were used to counter war elephants. The siege of Megara in 266 BC was broken when Megarians doused pigs in pitch, set them alight and drove them towards the enemy’s massed war elephants. The elephants bolted in terror, killing a large number of soldiers.
LkZVv TIL that in 3000 BC the North Star was not Polaris, but a star called Thuban, because the axis of the earth was pointed in a different direction back then. This is because of the precession of equinoxes speeding and slowing down of the earth's spin through imperceptible intervals.