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TIL a road called the King’s Highway was built from Boston MA to Charleston SC starting in 1650, on the order of King Charles II. Its northern section had been a Native American path for so long before that it was dug 2 feet into the ground, and it evolved into the first highways in North America.

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nendr TIL the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.
6ED5Q TIL that while working for web host Tripod, Ethan Zuckerman invented one of most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad."
aRjN TIL that since most people in Japan and China use their phones or computers to phonetically convert the Latin alphabet to type Chinese characters, more people are forgetting how to write some characters by hand. On a Chinese TV show, only 30% of participants could write “toad”, 癞蛤蟆 (Lài há ma).
QNXga TIL researchers testing the Infinite Monkey theorem: Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter "S", the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine
vPj0x TIL Simply calmly treading the water in a rip tide can return you to shore in 3 minutes, because rip currents are really whirlpools, according to an oceanography professor's study that sensors to analyze the flow of wave water. (Source: nps.edu, 2010)