Learning something new every day can be surprisingly fun, especially when it’s you who decides what topic to focus on each day. Chances are, you already find yourself delving deeper into the topics you never knew you were interested in (for instance, theBajau people, considered to be the best free-divers in the world) at times, arguably at least partially thanks to theinternet.It’s true – thanks to the online world, learning has never been easier, and one of the things that illustrates it best is the ‘Today I Learned’subreddit, brimming with fun facts about any and every topic there is. If you’re curious to see what kind of facts the community focuses on, scroll down to find some of them on the list below, and make sure to upvote the most fascinating things you learned from the community today.If you scroll down, you will also findBored Panda’srecent interview with an associate professor of history at Southern Utah University,Dave Lunt, who was kind enough to share his views on learning and even some stories about one of the most knowledge-hungry people ever lived.This post may includeaffiliate links.
Learning something new every day can be surprisingly fun, especially when it’s you who decides what topic to focus on each day. Chances are, you already find yourself delving deeper into the topics you never knew you were interested in (for instance, theBajau people, considered to be the best free-divers in the world) at times, arguably at least partially thanks to theinternet.
It’s true – thanks to the online world, learning has never been easier, and one of the things that illustrates it best is the ‘Today I Learned’subreddit, brimming with fun facts about any and every topic there is. If you’re curious to see what kind of facts the community focuses on, scroll down to find some of them on the list below, and make sure to upvote the most fascinating things you learned from the community today.
If you scroll down, you will also findBored Panda’srecent interview with an associate professor of history at Southern Utah University,Dave Lunt, who was kind enough to share his views on learning and even some stories about one of the most knowledge-hungry people ever lived.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
Heath Ledger refused to present the Oscars in 2007 after he and Jake Gyllenhaal were asked to make fun of their “Brokeback Mountain” characters' romance.
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During the siege of Leningrad during World War II, 28 scientists chose to die of hunger while protecting the seed vault at the Vavilov Institute rather than eating the seeds.
“I think it goes without saying for most people that learning is a vital part to being human, whether we call it formal education, ‘life lessons’, gaining experience, acquiring wisdom, or anything else,” Assoc. Prof. of history at Southern Utah University Dave Lunt said, discussing the importance of learning withBored Panda.“From the time we are babies, people are learning about their world. And I believe that we never stop learning, although we often go from formal learning to informal learning when we leaveschool(at whatever age, at whatever level). I would like to think that people remain hungry to learn throughout their lives, but—of course—this is not always the case. Sometimes, as we get older, we grow complacent in our conclusions and our beliefs, but I think one of the goals of formal education is to inspire students to remain ‘lifelong learners’ after they complete formal studies.”
“I think it goes without saying for most people that learning is a vital part to being human, whether we call it formal education, ‘life lessons’, gaining experience, acquiring wisdom, or anything else,” Assoc. Prof. of history at Southern Utah University Dave Lunt said, discussing the importance of learning withBored Panda.
“From the time we are babies, people are learning about their world. And I believe that we never stop learning, although we often go from formal learning to informal learning when we leaveschool(at whatever age, at whatever level). I would like to think that people remain hungry to learn throughout their lives, but—of course—this is not always the case. Sometimes, as we get older, we grow complacent in our conclusions and our beliefs, but I think one of the goals of formal education is to inspire students to remain ‘lifelong learners’ after they complete formal studies.”
In 200 CE, Roman Emperor Septimius Severus banned all female gladiatorial combat, reportedly after hearing such lewd jokes directed at women in an athletic contest that he feared the sport bred disrespect for all women.
Lunt noted that there are lots of different ideas about what the goal of education should be, from securing a good job, to inspiring responsible citizenship or living a “good" life. “One of my favorite characters from history is Socrates; at least the version of Socrates that we learn about from his student, Plato. Socrates is a good example to me of what a ‘lifelong learner’ might look like,” he shared.
“The word usually translated as ‘unexamined’ is ἀνεξέταστος, and it means something like ‘not looked into’ or ‘not inquired into’. It may not be exactly what Socrates meant, but I like to think of this sentence as a reminder to always be examining my own life, my beliefs, what I know, and what I’m learning,” Lunt explained, adding another interesting fact to our ‘Today I Learned’ list.
During WW2 the Nazis spent the modern day equivalent of 100 million usd to make a underground base in Poland which saw little to no use. Soon after building it they lost the war, and it is now one of the largest bat habitats in Europe.
As Assoc. Prof. Lunt mentioned, quite often learning extends way beyond graduating school or university. Some people are so curious, they never stop learning, and Socrates was seemingly one of such people.“Of course there are more ways to learn than merely sitting in a classroom or listening to a teacher. Going back to Socrates, he very famously was not a paid teacher. He didn’t work in a school. But he was extremely curious and always hungry to learn. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks another philosopher named Phaedrus to forgive him for his many questions, since he (Socrates) is ‘φιλομαθὴς’ (philomathes), which translates more-or-less to ‘a lover-of-learning’ [or ‘fond of learning’],” the expert noted.“If someone like Socrates, who was so smart and had many people looking to him as a teacher, was eager to learn, that drives home to me the importance of curiosity and inquiry. The world is a big place, with a lot of knowledge in it. We would all do well to learn as much as we can, whether it is in school, on-the-job, or ‘life lessons.’ There is always something out there for a curious person to learn.”
As Assoc. Prof. Lunt mentioned, quite often learning extends way beyond graduating school or university. Some people are so curious, they never stop learning, and Socrates was seemingly one of such people.
“Of course there are more ways to learn than merely sitting in a classroom or listening to a teacher. Going back to Socrates, he very famously was not a paid teacher. He didn’t work in a school. But he was extremely curious and always hungry to learn. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks another philosopher named Phaedrus to forgive him for his many questions, since he (Socrates) is ‘φιλομαθὴς’ (philomathes), which translates more-or-less to ‘a lover-of-learning’ [or ‘fond of learning’],” the expert noted.
“If someone like Socrates, who was so smart and had many people looking to him as a teacher, was eager to learn, that drives home to me the importance of curiosity and inquiry. The world is a big place, with a lot of knowledge in it. We would all do well to learn as much as we can, whether it is in school, on-the-job, or ‘life lessons.’ There is always something out there for a curious person to learn.”
In the Movie “Scream” (1996) there is a section in the credits saying “No Thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa city school district governing board” Santa Rosa revoked permissions to film there last minute and cost the production 350,000$.
The “S” in “Harry S. Truman” wasn’t an abbreviation. The dude’s middle name was literally just the letter S.
A 2022 California Supreme Court decision allowed bumble bees to be considered a protected species because they met the state’s legal definition of a “fish”.
Discussing theinternet’sinfluence on people’s willingness to or interest in learning nowadays, Lunt pointed out that it sure makes it easier to find information. “I am Generation X, so firmly in middle age, and I remember life before the internet pretty well. Even today, I am consistently amazed at how easy it is to find basic information on the internet – trivia, names, dates, things like that. I spent a lot of hours in college digging through books, flipping through pages, trying to remember where I had read or seen some fact or idea. Now all of that is readily available with a few keystrokes and a search engine.”
A clown saved 300 children during the deadliest avalanche in history. Only 400 people survived out of around 18,000 in the town of Yungay, Peru. The children were attending a circus and a clown led them to higher ground moments before the avalanche destroyed the entire town.
US president Benjamin Harrison was widowed while in office in 1892. Four years later, Harrison married his dead wife’s niece and had a daughter with her. His adult children who were around 40 years old, were horrified that their father married their cousin and didn’t attend the wedding.
“I suppose that psychologists and educators and lots of other smart people are studying the effects of the internet on human learning, education, memory, and other fields,” the historian continued. “But for me, the advent of the internet has made it easier to find facts and yet made it more difficult to think originally and creatively. Curating a limitless trove of information, some of it accurate, some of it inaccurate, is an impossible task and so, with the internet, ‘learning’ (for me) has shifted to interpretation of sources, understanding cause-and-effect, assessing reliability, and similar processes.
“Internet sites often offer interpretations that deserve more scrutiny, or opinions disguised as facts. This, I think, makes it all the more important for us to remain ‘lifelong learners’ in order to interpret information and assess reliability, and to be willing to update our conclusions when new information emerges. The internet is an enormously consequential and important tool for learning, but we shouldn’t let it do our thinking for us,” Lunt emphasized.
Tom Sawyer author Mark Twain invented the clasps commonly used on women’s bras.
Pirates and buccaneers sometimes engaged in “matelotage”, a practice in which male couples would agree to share their incomes and inherit their partner’s property in the case of their death.
Summing it up, Assoc. Prof. Lunt suggested that having a learning mindset is one of the most important assets that people can have today, especially younger people who are looking forcareersand starting out on their paths in life. “Being a learner shows humility – nobody knows all of the answers but we don’t always like to admit it. Even Socratesfamously announcedat his trial that the only thing he really knew was that he didn’t know anything.”
The native language of the volcanic island Manam Motu has no words for cardinal directions (North, East, West, South). Instead, it uses polar coördinates—with words meaning “towards the volcano”, ”towards the sea”, “clockwise around the volcano”, and “counterclockwise around the volcano”.
Four of the last 7 Illinois Govenors have been jailed.
Earth’s magnetic field was approximately twice as strong in Roman times as it is now.
In 1853, linguist and explorer Richard Francis Burton disguised himself as a Muslim and made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca which is required of all Muslims. He later wrote a book about his experiences.
Local Cretan resistance in WWII was so great that civilians would attack Axis paratroopers as they were landing with knives, axes, scythes and even their bare hands.
Rodin, the famed sculptor, didn’t actually sculpt in marble. He made sand models and his assistants, namely Camille Claudel, made the art we love.
There was case in US where a person failed to die during electric chair execution and then his lawyers tried to argue that he was not dead but he had been executed and that it was cruel to go through a second time.
Millvina Dean was the last and youngest survivor of the Titanic. She was just over 2 months old when the Titanic sank on April 14, 1912. Dean credits her father for her survival. She was one of 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.
Near the end of her life, Ada Lovelace had a religious transformation and began to repent the conduct of her life. After confessing something to her husband 3 months before her death, he abandoned her bedside. It is not known what she told him.
In China, water is typically drunk hot.
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Catherine O’Hara (Moira from Shitt’s Creek) has reversed internal organs, a condition known as situs inversus.
Levi Hutchins created America’s first mechanical alarm clock in 1787 because he wanted to get up at 4am every day. So his device was only set to that desired time and it was another 60 years before Antoine Redier made one that was able to be adjusted to a time other than 4am.
Julius Schmid arrived in NYC as a penniless, partially paralyzed German immigrant. He got a job at a sausage maker where he started selling the leftover animal intestines as condoms. He grew this into a multi-million dollar business eventually being named “the undisputed king of condoms”.
During a 6-mo period, 2,055 Brown Recluse spiders were collected in a 19th-century-built home in Lenexa, KS. Estimates show that at least 400 spiders were large enough to cause envenomation. A family of 4 had been living there since 1996 and had never been bit despite seeing them multiple times.
The world’s first hard drive, the IBM 350, was introduced in 1956. It was leased to companies for $37,600/month (adjusted to 2024), weighed one ton, and held 3.75 MB, about the size of a small PDF file.
In Japan, you can hire a person to apologize on your behalf.
The average cost of obtaining a Driver’s License in Germany is 3,000€ or $3,300. The total includes fees for: authorities and exams, learning materials, driving lessons and tuition.
Glenn Hughes, an American singer who was the original “Leatherman” character in the disco group Village People, was interred wearing his leatherman outfit at Saint Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.
During the rescue of Maersk Alabama Captain Phillips from Somali pirates the $30,000 in cash they obtained from the ship went missing, 2 Seal team six members were investigated but never charged. The money was never recovered.
Up until the 1980s, all major UK banks had to have their head offices within a 10 minute walk of the Bank of England. This was so that in the event of a financial crisis, the heads of each bank could easily be assembled.
A group of American sugar plantation owners with support of the US Government overthrew the last Queen of Hawaii, Queen Liliuokalani to make Hawaii a US Protectorate. Hawaii would later be annexed.
Although Sweden has the lowest level of people who smoke in Europe (9.3%), it’s the only country where noticeably more women smoke than men.
A Romanian Orthodox priest and four nuns were jailed after they accidentally killed another nun in 2005 during an exorcism. They mistook her schizophrenia symptoms for demonic possession.
The phosphorus used in fertilizer for food production is considered a non-renewable and finite resource we will run out of someday.
The reason your mouth may feel gross after eating spinach is due to a chemical reaction called “spinach teeth”.
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The air force has a program in place that will keep B-52 bombers flying for over a hundred years since they were manufactured.
Spongebob Squarepants is credited for creating wider awareness of Leif Erikson Day outside the Norwegian-American community.
In 2000, a convicted murderer on death row’s execution was denied because he was “too fat to hang”.
In 2000, three Scottish sisters took out a 1 million pound insurance policy in the event one of them immaculately conceived the second coming of Christ. They paid £100 a year until 2006 when the insurance company canceled the policy.
Bess Myerson who was the first Miss America, to be Jewish, in 1945. Reactions to her win were mixed, while Jews hailed her a hero and compared her to Queen Esther, 3 out of the 5 sponsors of Miss America refused to have her represent them. She later became a politician.
To prevent hardware disease, farmers feed cows magnets to bind any metal they eat in the fields.
A neutrino could pass through a lightyear of lead before it has a 50% chance of hitting a lead atom.
The torpedoed rms lusitania sank in broad daylight within sight of the coast in just 18 minutes, killing 1197 people.
There’s a secret material called FOGBANK that is used in nuclear warheads. “The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified.”
A U.S. Air Force officer, John Stapp, survived a deceleration of 46.2 Gs during a rocket sled experiment in 1954, experiencing a rapid stop from 632 mph to 0 in just 1.4 seconds.
The 14-year-old actress in Kubrick’s Lolita was apparently having a real-life “Lolita” experience with a 32-year-old producer during filming.
Gordon Ramsay robbed the restaurant that he was working in and framed his mentor Marco Pierre White so that they wouldn’t hire him to replace Ramsay.
Aphantasia is a condition affecting 1 to 3% of people. Its mind or imagination blindness. People with Aphantasia cannot visualize anything in the minds.
The Panopticon prison design used centrally positioned guards to create the illusion of constant surveillance, ensuring low-cost control over inmates behavior.
Modern broiler chickens have been bred to get so heavy so quickly it can lead to bone deformities.
South Asians are genetically predisposed to higher rates of central body obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Frank Abagnale, the real-life inspiration for Catch Me If You Can, fabricated most of his infamous conman exploits, and much of his story was a hoax.
The last Communist leader of East Germany, Egon Krenz, is still alive. He spent 4 years in prison for crimes committed as a high-ranking politician in East Germany. He also still defends the former East Germany, is a Russophile, and believes that the Cold War never ended.
Strawberry Pop-Tarts are one of the most purchased food items at Walmart during hurricane preparation.
Over 60 percent of tooth decay involves genetic factors.
Mickey Mantle, Hall of Fame CF, tore his ACL in his rookie year during the 1951 World Series. He went on to play the rest of his 18-year career on a torn ACL.
In 2018 three illegally installed vending machines (that required an 8-inch hole to be dug & filled with concrete) were discovered in Long Island to be selling “crack pipes” disguised as pens for $2 each. The machines were originally tampon dispensers that had been ripped out of bathrooms.
In Japan you can visit Soineya, a co-sleeping specialty shop. It’s a cafe where you pay for sleeping (literally) or cuddling with a girl you like.
Strongheart, a male German shepherd who was one of the earliest canine movie stars. Originally trained as a police dog, Strongheart served in the German Red Cross during World War I. Tragically he was burnt in an accident with a hot studio light, dying at age 11 on June 24, 1929.
The cancelation of the US-Mexico Bracero Program indirectly lead to tasteless supermarket tomatoes.
While practicing for the ‘92 Olympics, the Dream Team lost (62-54) to an assembled squad of the best NCAA players. Head Coach Chuck Daly had limited Jordan’s playing time & also made other non-optimal substitions in order to “throw the game” to teach the NBA players that they were not unbeatable.
About Jamake Highwater, a consultant on Star Trek: Voyager who made a career out of lying about being Native American.
In 2007, Hamburg Mannheimer International (HMI), now part of Munich Re, held a party in Budapest with 20 prostitutes to reward 100 of its best salesmen.
Rikers Island, New York City’s largest jail, is located only 422 feet away from the runway of La Guardia Airport.
After the trailer of Grand Theft Auto VI was released, its featured song, Tom Petty’s “Love Is a Long Road”, saw a near-37,000% increase in Spotify streams, had almost 250,000 searches on Shazam, and ranked second on the worldwide iTunes chart.
The Tiger Keelback snake, one of the very few poisonous-venomous snakes in the World.
A man sued his own search warrant and won the case in the Supreme Court. Titled Marcus v. Search Warrant, he believed the warrant was too vague and was unable to sue any of the agents as they acted within the law.
Unicode uses elephants as a baseline comparison for cultural frequency when considering whether to add a new emoji.
Seth McFarlane is one of many waiting to be cryopreserved when they die.
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