Barnorama All Fun In The Barn
Explore a diverse range of knowledge that not only stimulates your intellect but also contributes to the overall well-being of your cognitive functions.
“TIL a guide dog named Roselle led a group of people including her blind owner down 78 flights of stairs before the North Tower collapsed on 9/11. She only stopped to give kisses to a woman who was having a panic attack.”
“TIL the former World Chess Champion G. Kasparov described Hungarian female chess player Polgár as a “circus puppet” and said that women chess players should stick to having children. Later in September 2002, in the Russia versus the Rest of the World Match, Polgár defeated Garry Kasparov.”
“TIL:In January 1960, white jazz pianist Dave Brubeck canceled a twenty-five-date tour of colleges and universities across the American South after twenty-two schools had refused to allow his black bassist, Eugene Wright, to perform. He also canceled a tv show where they didn’t want to show him.”
“TIL of Syndrome K: a fake disease that Italian doctors made up to save Jews who had fled to their hospital seeking protection from the Nazis. Syndrome K “patients” were quarantined and the Nazis were told that it was a deadly, disfiguring, and highly contagious illness. They saved at least 20 lives.”
“TIL Romans were known to create tombs for their dogs and gave them epitaphs to remember them by. One such inscription read, “I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home with my own hands 15 years ago.””
“TIL hundreds of love letters between two gay World War II soldiers were found and are being made into a book. In one, one of them wrote, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are.””
“TIL of Dr. Donald Hopkins. He helped eradicate Smallpox, and is on the verge of killing another disease. He’s taken Guinea Worm Disease down from 3.5 million cases a year to just 28 cases last year.”
“TIL A Scottish woman was sentenced to death by hanging around 1721. Maggie Dickson was hung, declared dead, put in a wooden coffin and carted off. She woke up en route to the churchyard, the law said her sentence had been carried out and she lived another 40 years known as ‘Half-hangit Maggie’.”
“TIL that everyone in Singapore above the age of 21 is automatically registered as an organ donor. Opting out from this Act will result in you being put at the very bottom of the organ priority list, should you need an organ transplantation.”
“TIL In 1959, police were called to a segregated library in S. Carolina when a 9yr-old Black boy refused to leave. He later got a PhD in Physics from MIT, and died in 1986, one of the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Challenger. The library that refused to lend him books is now named after him.”
“TIL of Adolfo Kaminsky, a 18 year-old French forger who faked IDs for Jews during WWII. He once worked for 3 days straight to make papers for 300 children until he passed out. He kept his work a secret – his own daughter only learned the details while writing a book about him.”
“TIL that a 13-year-old opened a hot dog stand in front of his home in Minnesota, causing a complaint to the health department. Instead of shutting him down, the inspectors helped him bring his stand up to code and paid the $87 fee for his permit out of their own pockets.”
“TIL that In 2018, A hacker broke into people’s routers (100,000 of them) and patched their vulnerabilities up so that they couldn’t be abused by other hackers.”
“TIL when NASA used electronic computers for the first time – to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around Earth – officials called on Katherine Johnson to verify the computer’s numbers; Glenn had asked for her specifically and had refused to fly unless Johnson verified the calculations.”
“TIL: Researchers taught African grey parrots to buy food using tokens. They were then paired up, one parrot given ten tokens and the other none. Without any incentive for sharing, parrots with tokens started to give some to their broke partners so that everyone could eat.”
“TIL that in 1920, the town of Jackson, Wyoming elected an all-female town council by a margin of 2-1 over the men, drawing the most voters the town had ever seen. Known as the “pettycoat rulers,” the women served for 3 years and did a great deal to clean up the notoriously lawless town.”
“TIL Dogs get sprayed by Skunks so often because Skunks lift their tails as a warning, Dogs see this as “Come smell my butt” which is the EXACT OPPOSITE MESSAGE from what the Skunk is trying to send.”
“TIL about the symbiotic relationship of wolves and ravens. Ravens will lead wolves to prey so that they can take a portion of the leftovers, play games of tail chasing with each other, and develop individual friendships.”
“TIL in 1992, a California middle school ordered teachers to cover up all “obscene” words in Fahrenheit 451 with black marker before issuing copies to students. The school stopped this practice after local newspapers commented on the irony of defacing a book that condemns censorship.”
“TIL there’s a cemetery in the Netherlands consisting of 8,300 US veterans who died in WWII. For the past 70 years, Dutch families have come to the cemetery every Sunday to care for a grave they adopted. Hundreds of people are currently on a waiting list to become caretakers.”
“TIL after losing her position in her university’s anatomy department in 1938, Rita Levi-Montalcini set up a laboratory in her bedroom and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos. This work led to her discovery of nerve growth factor, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1986.”
“TIL mercy dogs were trained during World War I to comfort mortally wounded soldiers as they died in no man’s land.”
“TIL after Marcelo Bielsa became manager of Leeds United FC, he found out that the average fan had to work 3 hours to pay for a match ticket. He called his players together and made them pick up litter from around the training ground for 3 hours, to appreciate how the fans laboured for their passion.”
“TIL that paper books still outsells e-books by a huge margin, even among young people.”
“A school principal once made a student who’d gotten into trouble sit in the basement & read the U.S. Constitution as punishment. That student (who committed the Constitution to memory as a result) was Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the first Black Supreme Court justice.”
“TIL about the Danish Protest Pig. In the early 20th century, Danes living under Prussian rule were banned from displaying the Danish flag. To protest this, they bred pigs with a red and white color pattern similar to their flag. The breed is now called “Danish Protest Pig”.”
“TIL that the firm Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees on 9/11. The CEO, who was taking his child to school that day, later distributed $180 million to the families and offered jobs to all children of the victims. 57 of those children were employed by Cantor Fitzgerald as of 2016.”
“In World War 1, Nobel prize winning physicist Marie Curie developed mobile X-Ray stations to travel to the frontlines and assist army surgeons and preventing amputations when limbs were still intact. It’s estimated that over a million wounded soldiers were x-rayed with her units.”
“TIL: Late wrestler Bam Bam Bigelow once saved three children from a burning house and 40% of his skin was left with second degree burns forcing him to retire and hospitalized for two months. Bam Bam said he had “no regrets” of his act of courage, as long as all three kids were safe.”
“TIL Joseph Strauss, the engineer of the golden Gate Bridge, mandated that a net be installed under the bridge for safety while being built. This was revolutionary at the time. The net caught 19 men who fell, saving all of them from a certain death.”
“Slaveholders in the US knew that enslaved people were escaping to Mexico, the U.S. tried to get Mexico to sign a fugitive slave treaty, but Mexico refused to sign such a treaty, insisting that all enslaved people were free once they set foot on Mexican soil.”
“The Curie family is the family with the most Nobel Prizes. Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry. Her husband Pierre Curie won a Nobel in physics. Their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won a Nobel prize in chemistry.”
“TIL of Waverly Woodson, a black medic who treated at least 200 injured men on D-Day while injured himself. As he hit the beach a shell tore apart his landing craft, filling him with shrapnel. Despite this, he set up an aid station and treated wounds for 30 hours, at one point even amputating a foot.”
“TIL: In a village in India, an Indian robin had made a nest and laid her eggs on the village’s switchboard. The village decided to go without street lights for over a month for the safety of the bird and to allow her eggs to hatch. After 45 days, the bird and its hatchlings safely flew away.”
“Vears at Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in Montana have jobs: try to open coolers/dumpsters/containers of treats. If bears can’t make more than a tiny hole, the item is certified bear-proof. The GWDC is the only place where products can earn a certificate from the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee.”
“TIL that in 1916 there was a proposed Amendment to the US Constitution that would put all acts of war to a national vote, and anyone voting yes would have to register as a volunteer for service in the United States Army.”
“Penguins can drink saltwater because of glands near their eyes that remove salt from their bloodstream and then they can sneeze out the extra salt.”
“After Universidad del Mar was closed by Chilean government due to major financial irregularities, artist Papas Fritas managed to enter its vault and burn tuition contracts amounting to $500 million, making difficult to prove students owed the university this money.”
“TIL that when filming the TV series “The Mandalorian” in 2019, the crew ran out of Stormtrooper costumes, so they reached out to the local branch of a Star Wars fan organisation, whose members came to join the filming in their own home-made Stormtrooper costumes.”
“TIL Joseph Bazalgette, the man who designed London’s sewers in the 1860’s, said ‘Well, we’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen’ and doubled the pipe diameter. If he had not done this, it would have overflowed in the 1960’s (it’s still in use today).”
“TIL that Bill Murray once drove a taxi cab so that the cab driver could spend time playing saxophone in the backseat. The cab driver mentioned that he never had time to play his sax since he had to work 14 hours a day. Murray took the driver’s seat so that he could finally play some tunes.”
“TIL that Majel Barrett, the voice of the Starfleet computer on Star Trek, recorded an entire library of phonetic sounds before she died which allowed her voice to be used as the computer for future generations.”
“TIL Saudi Arabia accidentally printed thousands of textbooks containing an image of Yoda sitting next to King Faisal while he signed the 1945 UN charter.”
“TIL in the months before his sudden death, former Mythbuster Grant Imahara built a fully animatronic Baby Yoda. Having spent 3 months of his personal time designing, programming, and 3D printing the project, he intended to bring it to hospitals to cheer up sick children.”
“TIL: In order to get improvements in their job security amidst the emergence of a rival bus line, bus drivers in Okayama, Japan decided to go on strike in a unique way in 2018. While on strike, they supported the community by continuing to drive their routes, but simply not charging customers.”
“Elinor Powell was a black nurse who served during WWII. She was assigned to work at a POW camp, like most African-American nurses at the time, and fell in love with a German POW there. They married and had children despite it being illegal in both the U.S and Germany during this time period.”
“TIL that baby owls sleep down on their stomach because their heads are too heavy. They do that until they are large enough to sleep upright.”
“TIL Lithuania withdrew from the 1992 Olympics due to the lack of money after the fall of the USSR. The Grateful Dead agreed to fund transportation costs for the basketball team along with Grateful Dead designs for the team’s jerseys and shorts. They went on to win the Bronze.”
Source: www.reddit.com