› added 8 months ago

29

TIL of Benford's Law, which states that almost 50% of numbers in real-life datasets start with 1 or 2. This can be used to detect tax fraud.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

BgL9r TIL that in England in the Middle Ages, a fugitive could claim sanctuary simply by touching the knocker on the outer door of a church to be immune from arrest.
gr8gX TIL compasses are made differently for northern & southern hemispheres, because the magnetic field dips N / S. This requires the needle to be counter-weighted at the S end for northern hemisphere & vice versa. A northern compass used below the equator would likely drag its S tip on the compass base!
XKKQ TIL that a new radio telescope being built in Australia and South Africa will generate so much data about space that it will exceed global internet traffic by a large margin. An exabyte per day of raw data, which could be compressed to around 10 petabytes.
JYMO4 TIL that the US Medal of Honor has been awarded to 61 Canadians.
VBX9k TIL that in the late 1800s, pharmaceutical company Bayer was trying to find a safer version of their popular cold medicine, morphine. This accidentally resulted in the creation and marketing of one of the most addictive and dangerous drugs, diacetylmorphine, commonly know today as “heroin”