› added 9 years ago

84

TIL that dropping a bomb from a balloon is, to this day, a violation of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, although there is no such prohibition for dropping a bomb from an aircraft

Read more icrc.org

via reddit.com

WkEr8 TIL Hernando Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, started a universal library in Seville, Spain. He really did try to collect everything, and catalogued books, manuscripts, pamphlets and tavern posters, from weighty tomes to throwaway ephemera.
E1Rro TIL about numeronyms, words where a number is used to form an abbreviation. One of its uses is to replace the letters between the first and last letter in a word with the number of letters omitted. Thus, “internationalization” becomes “i18n”!
7Npb TIL Angostura bitters labels are too big for the bottle because two brothers that started the company, one designed the label, the other, the bottle, and they didn’t consult with one another about the size. It became their signature.
neX8o TIL that Dr. Carlo Urbani recognized the emergence of a outbreak of pneumonia as a new epidemic and immediately notified the WHO, personally flying to Hanoi to investigate. He would die this day in 2003 of SARS, having triggered the most effective response to an epidemic in history.
5Yrv9 TIL in 1979 when the Skylab re-entry approached the San Francisco Examine offered $10,000 to the first person to deliver a piece to them within 72hrs knowing it wasn't heading toward the USA. A 17yr old Aussie collected a piece, jumped on a plane with no passport or luggage and collected his prize.