› added 12 years ago

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TIL that corporal punishment (spanking) is still practiced in the United States and in the 2006-07 school year more than ¼ million kids were spanked. A disproportionate number of those hit were children with disabilities

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via reddit.com

wo8aM TIL: Garbage trucks in Taiwan use Für Elise to let people know that the garbage pickup is happening, in kind of the same way ice cream trucks use tunes in the U.S. to get people to line up for frozen dessert.
N7pkN TIL that the language spoken in Wakanda is Xhosa, an official language of South Africa and Zimbabwe and that John Kani who played King T'Chaka is a native speaker
epw64 TIL that only the President, Governor, or Mayor of Washington, DC can order flags to fly at half-staff
VMKmQ TIL of SR-71 Blackbird test pilot Bill Weaver, who survived a free fall from space after his plane disintegrated around him doing Mach 3.2
XEGgP TIL that term 'patient zero' was coined by mistake during the 80's AIDS pandemic, when someone read Patient O (as in first recorded in US Outside California) wrongly