After Washington became president, he had to move to the country’s Capitol where laws said that he could not keep his slaves after six months, so he repeatedly moved his slaves in and out of the state in order to keep them indefinitely. He even told his secretary to move the slaves “in a way that will deceive both them and the public.”

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/slavery-and-washingtons-presidency/

As a side note… After his death he left his remaining slaves to his wife Martha, and since they were inherited they would belong to her and then be freed when she died. She quickly realized that the only thing between the freedom of these enslaved people and their continued servitude was her own life, so she granted them all freedom immediately except for Oney Judge, who had escaped years earlier after George passed laws to prevent slaves in her specific scenario from ever achieving her own freedom.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/independence-oneyjudge.htm

It used to be popular among European landowners to have a garden hermit as part of the landscaping decor.

Here’s a random interesting car fact. The accelerator pedal only controls how much air makes it to the engine; it opens and closes a flap in the air intake called the throttle body. The car has a sensor that records how much air is coming in, the mass airflow sensor, which is just a wire in the airstream. Electrical resistance in metals is proportional to temperature, and the air rushing by cools the wire. The car’s computer is then programmed to inject fuel according to the estimated amount of air coming in, which is double checked with oxygen sensors in the exhaust (which detect uncombusted air, i.e., too little fuel).

Plants have evolved to become carnivorous at least nine separate and unrelated times throughout history. Venus flytraps are only native to a tiny and shrinking part of the world, swampland around the Carolinas. They are at risk of going extinct in nature in the next few decades.

TVTropes is what I sink my time in when I want a good laugh and have absolutely no motivation to do anything but doomscroll through text. Pick a favourite series you don’t mind spoilers on and read through all the tropes for a good laugh or to reminisce over what was good or bad about the series.

Light travels at different speeds through different mediums (air, glass, water…etc). In some materials it can move incredibly slow. Why is this?

In simple terms. A photon is absorbed by an electron, moving it from a ground state and up an orbital to an excited state. The electron then falls back down to it’s ground state re-imitting the photon, which then gets re-absorbed by another electron on another atom…etc

For more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy

I’m just a layman, but find topics about how the world around us works to be fascinating.

Contrary to popular belief, one could always know when to expect the Spanish inquisition. They gave 30 days notice.

There is a language practice called Mincing, but there are VERY rare cases of REVERSE mincing!

People ask 'Is it “For fuck sake” or “for fucks sake”. The OG worst curse was “For Christ’s sake” as you were taking the Lord’s name in vain. At first the solution was “Don’t do it” but as we started to get other curses brought in and spread in popularity mincing became a thing.

So you hit your thumb with a hammer and say “OH FUUUUU-DGE!” Changing the “Fuck” to “Fudge” is mincing! Stub your toe, “JEEE-PERS that hurt!”

Now “For Christ’s sake!” (Like I said before) is a very old curse, and a well used one, but (in one of a literal handful of cases) we decided that IT WASN’T A BAD ENOUGH CURSE AND NEEDED TO GO HARDER.

So we REVERSED MINCED IT.

Christ became fuck.

And because in the sentence his sake is possessive ('s sake) it should ALWAYS be “fuck’s sake”. Fuck obviously has never been a person, but in this context we have renamed gods son “Fuck” for the purpose of expressing how annoyed / angry we are. And everyone is cool with it. 😂

Pigeons are better at solving the Monty Hall Problem than humans are.

Beavers eat their own poop.

This sounds like the sort of thing that’s probably apocryphal but it’s a thing I was taught in Spanish class that’s certainly been linting up my brain ever since:

The avocado got its name for an indigenous word for testicle, referring not only to its shape but also its texture; if you’ve got any testicles handy, their degree of softness is what a ripe avocado should feel like.

I have a ton of these. I’ll start with history:

The name of the woman depicted by the Statue of Liberty is “The Mother of Exiles”.

On Feb 2, 2014, former New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio killed NY’s official weather-forecasting groundhog by accidentally dropping it.

Dr. Ben Spock is most well-known for his groundbreaking 1946 book on child-rearing, but he’s less well-known for winning an Olympic gold medal in rowing (in 1924).

The Second Congo War, which ran from 1998 to 2003, still holds the dubious distinction of being the deadliest war since WWII (5.4 million casualties).

When it was founded, Oxford University did not teach any classes on the Aztec Empire or calculus, because neither existed.

The oldest continuously-honored international alliance that is still in force today is the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance between England and Portugal, which was signed in 1386. [Note that there are a lot of people who will claim that the Auld Alliance (between Scotland and France against England, signed in 1295) is the rightful holder of this distinction, but they’re wrong: it was formally ended with the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560, even though some groups continued to uphold it anyway, and it was made entirely obsolete by the Acts of Union in 1707, when Scotland was brought into the UK.]

And to mix it up a little, here’s a bit of sports trivia:

Kobe Bryant is one of only 5 players in NBA history to have won the All-Star MVP award more than twice. Of those 5 players, Kobe is the only one who’s dead (as far as I know right now). The rest are all still alive, because the NBA is much younger than most people think of it as being.

Facts have a half-life of about 7 years and it’s decreasing