› added 5 years ago

83

TIL there is a Kurdish saying that they have “no friends but the mountains”. This is due to their status as a stateless minority and frequent betrayal by their allies.

bBMZ TIL that a number far larger than a googol and googolplex exists. Graham’s number is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain a digital representation of the number, assuming one Planck volume per digit.
wLYPE TIL a coin left at the grave site of a U.S. veteran is meant as a message to the deceased soldier's family that someone has visited the grave to pay respect. Leaving a penny means you visited, a nickle means you trained at boot camp together and a dime means you served together in some capacity.
vMQ7 TIL: The Golden Buddha statue was completely plastered over before 1767 to prevent it from being stolen, the hidden golden statue was only re-discovered in 1950 when the ropes broke while trying to move the statue causing the plaster to break when it hit the ground.
p8aVQ TIL after a Japanese Destroyer rammed the ship Naval Lieutenant John F. Kennedy was on during WW2, Kennedy swam for 5 hours towards an island while towing one of his badly burned crewman by clasping a scrap of the crewman's lifejacket between his teeth despite sustaining a back injury from the crash
Omw6 TIL that a man charged people up to “one billion dollars” to teach them how to survive on breathing alone. When caught eating junk food, he claimed that diet coke and McDonalds cheeseburgers help him “maintain balance” and hold “special 5D properties”