Things I Learned
- Town planning used to be an Olympic event (source)
- A panenka is a technique used while taking a soccer penalty kick in which the taker, instead of kicking the ball to the left or right of the goalkeeper, kicks the ball to the center of the goal (source)
- JRR Tolkein’s first civilian job was an editorship at the Oxford English Dictionary in charge of words beginning with the letter “W”. (source)
- American Airlines has twice sold unlimited first-class travel tickets, once in 1981 for $250,000; once in 2004 for $3 million. While the 1981 pass sold out, there were no takers for the 2004 pass. (source)
- Pocahontas is buried in Kent, England (source)
- At the time of the September 11th attacks, the FBI has just eight Arabic speaking agents. (source)
- Americans 55 and up control 70% of household wealth. (source)
- The high five was popularized in the 1980s; the earliest known examples are from the 1960s; and the term itself is from 1981. (source)
- Since 1926, 4 out of every 7 stocks in the U.S. have underperformed cash (source)
- Phoenicia, meaning “land of purple”, was name after the land’s chief marketable commodity: purple dye extracted from the shells of the murex snail. (source)
- Lip Syncing is illegal in Turkmenistan (source).
- Judaeo-Papiamento, the ethnolect of Papiamento spoken by the Sephardic Jewish community of Curaçao in the Dutch Caribbean, is the only living Jewish ethnolect based on a creole language. (source)
- The average American spends $222 a month eating out at restaurants (source).
- Every Rubik’s cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer. (source)
- October 31, 200 was the last day in which every human was on earth. Since then, there has been at least one human in space at all times (source
- Chase and American Express waive all credit card fees (including annual fees) for active duty military in order to comply with federal law. (source)
- Mountain Dew was originally a 19th-century slang term for whiskey, especially Highland Scotch whisky. (source)
Graphs I Liked