Today I found out why some countries drive on the right and some countries drive on the left. The origin of this varies based on the time period and country, but primarily throughout history people used the “keep-left” rule. It has only been very recently that the world has predominately switched to the “keep-right” rule. The first real archaeological evidence […]
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Today I found out the origin of the word “soccer”. For all you out there who love to complain when Americans, and certain others, call “Football”, “Soccer”, you should know that it was the British that invented the word and it was also one of the first names of what we now primarily know of as “Football”. In fact, in […]
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Today I found out nearly all commercial banana plants are perfect clones of one another and most originate from one single plant from Southeast Asia. Now to be clear, there are approximately 1000 different types of banana plants in the world today and within each variety most are generally clones of one another, although some do have a bit of […]
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Today I found out to always shut down MySQL instances manually before restarting the operating system. 🙂 You may have noticed TodayIFoundout.com has been down for the last 38 or so hours. Long story short, I needed to restart my server and when it came back up, the MySQL instance had been corrupted due to not shutting down all the […]
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Today I found out a Coffee bean is not actually a bean, rather it is a seed. Now I know you are saying to yourself right now, “Aren’t beans seeds and seeds beans?” Surprisingly, that is not the case. (who knew?) In fact, though beans are always seeds, seeds are not always beans. A bean is just one kind of […]
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Today I found out what a.m. and p.m. stand for. And no, it’s not, as my first grade teacher told me, “After Midnight” and “Past Midday”. LIES!!! Though, funny enough, not really that far off the translated versions of the Latin words for which a.m. and p.m. actually do stand for. It turns out, a.m. stands for “ante meridiem”, which […]
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Today I found out how to hack an alarm clock to do really cool things. (note: This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Swiss Army Knives . All opinions however are 100% mine. If you are interested in picking up the Swiss Army Knife used in this article, you can do so here: Dual Pro X) […]
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Today I found out the difference between “faze” and “phase”. These two words are often misused, even by professional writers, particularly in regards to the phrase “phased out”, which is more often than not incorrectly written as “fazed out”, due to the two being homophones. Specifically, “faze” means: “to disturb, disconcert, or daunt; caused to show discomposure”. On the other […]
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Today I found out Jesus wasn’t really a carpenter, at least not as we understand the profession. Now obviously, eventually Jesus’s chosen profession was of a “Rabbi” or teacher; so in that sense he wasn’t a carpenter regardless of translation. However, in his early years, it is supposed from Mark 6:2-3 that he was, like his step-father, a “carpenter” as […]
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Today I found out how to tell if you are a supertaster. What’s a supertaster you ask? More or less, it’s just someone with a heck of a lot more taste-buds than the average person. Specifically, someone with more than about 35 papillae per 7mm diameter circle on their tongue. Papillae are tiny structures on your tongue that contain your […]
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Today I found out where the dollar sign ($) comes from. This symbol first showed up in the 1770s, appearing in documents of English-Americans who had business dealings with Spanish-Americans. However, it wasn’t until the very early 1800s that it became popularized, around the same time as the first official U.S. dollars were being minted. Previous to this, the symbol […]
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Today I found out what causes the pain in your side you may occasionally feel while running or doing other jarring activities. This pain, known often as “side stitch” and more technically as “exercise related transient abdominal pain” (ETAP), often occurs while running, swimming, and horse riding, among others; it is caused by various stresses on your diaphragm that result […]
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Today I found out that Lobsters do not mate for life, contrary to popular belief. The origins of the myth that they do mate for life are not completely known, but this myth was first publicly popularized on an episode of Friends (Episode 2.14) where Phoebe says Ross is Rachel’s “lobster” and goes on to say that it is a […]
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Today I found out what causes “eye floaters”. For those who’ve never experienced this phenomenon, eye floaters are little oddly shaped objects that appear in your vision, often when one looks at bright light such as a blue sky. Their shapes vary greatly, but will often appear as spots, cobwebs, or randomly shaped stringy objects. These are not optical illusions, […]
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Today I found out that the word ‘whence’ is pretty much always used incorrectly, especially by modern day writers. For example, (from the Lord of the Rings, spoken by Elrond): “The Ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom; only there can it be unmade. It must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm […]
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Today I found out that Honey Bees know the world is round and can calculate angles. It turns out, scientists have figured out how to interpret a Honey Bee’s dance; a Honey Bees dance is where they communicate where to find food, a new home, and things of this nature. Using this information, an experiment was done called the “Schafberg […]
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Today I found out the difference between jelly and jam. The difference between jelly and jam is that jelly is made strictly from the juice of fruit while jam is made from crushed fruit. Specifically, jelly is made by crushing fruit, then straining out everything but the juice. The juice is then boiled, typically with sugar and pectin added, the […]
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Today I found out what the color of the twist tie or tabs on bread packaging means; namely, what day of the week the bread was baked on. This practice of having a different color twist ties or tabs for different days of the week is not meant necessarily to be used by the customer, but actually to aid the […]
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