› added 9 years ago

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TIL Microsoft once deliberately made MSN.com look faulty in Opera browsers, pushing Opera users to IE. As a reply, Opera Software released Opera Bork Edition, which made MSN.com look like its text was written in gibberish by Swedish Chef from Muppets Show.

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via reddit.com

EgxBx TIL about the green flash during sunset, a phenomenon that occurs at sunset and sunrise when conditions are favorable, and results when two optical phenomena combine: a mirage and the dispersion of sunlight
6l6l TIL that the table knife has a rounded tip because in 1669, Louis XIV decreed that all pointed knives be dulled down to reduce violence in Court and the streets.
PYOkL TIL that Helen Keller was an radical activist, campaigning for the Socialist Party and helping start the ACLU.
N7Xb1 Eighty-five years so far. The pitch-drop experiment—really more of a demonstration—began in 1927 when Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, set out to show his students that tar pitch, a derivative of coal so brittle that it can be smashed to pieces with a hammer, is in fact a highly viscous fluid. It flows at room temperature, albeit extremely slowly.
xQ97 TIL there is a 240 square kilometer zone many believe to be the site of Genghis Khan’s grave that was guarded from Khan’s death in 1227 until 1991. Khan’s tomb has still not been found.