› added 11 years ago

58

TIL that if you roll your mouse over the pronunciation text in wikipedia, it tells you in plain english how to pronounce the word (Try it here over ɒziˈmændiəs)

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Lkkem TIL that an anonymous Swedish band's only release went to number one even though the entire album was recorded in a nonsense language
awyaM TIL the Chicken Ranch was the Oldest Continually Operating Whorehouse in the United States when it closed in 1973. - During the Great Depression the "house of ill repute" offered time with a "lady of the evening" in exchange for a chicken. [The brothel was listed on the tax rolls as a poultry farm.]
gQ9b TIL to get women to smoke cigarettes in the 1920s, tobacco companies devised a campaign of equating cigarettes as “torches of freedom.” The campaign helped women smoking jump from 5% in 1923 to 18.1% in 1935.
764x TIL that when Koichi Tanaka of Japan won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2002, he became the first to only have a bachelor’s degree. Tanaka was so unknown that he was on the second-lowest job level at the obscure Shimadzu Corp. The embarrassed scientific-instrument maker immediately promoted Tanaka.
nBWr TIL A researcher found that it takes no more than 3.5% of the population of a country participating in sustained nonviolent civil disobedience to topple a totalitarian government