TIL The salary of John Hawkwood, the infamous mercenary captain who spend most of his career employeed in Italy, ranged between 6k and 80k florins a year(just from his military contracts). A skilled craftsman in the same period was earning about 30 florins per year [Source]

TIL a 2022 study revealed that 35% of the adults in Japan intend to "never travel" again. No other country "came close to the travel reluctance shown in Japan"; the next highest was South Korea at 15%. [Source]

TIL after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the remaining three reactors continued operations, with the last reactor having been shut down in 2000. [Source]

TIL direct voluntary control of pupil dilation and constriction was deemed to be impossible, however, in 2021 a 23-year-old man in Germany demonstrated his ability to drastically change his pupil size on command to doctors. [Source]

TIL that "Baghdad Bob" is believed to still be alive and living quietly in UAE at 94 or 95 years old. [Source]

TIL that the shortest time a person was a British peer was 1 hour. [Source]

TIL Under King Kamehameha I, the Kingdom of Hawaii had the largest navy in the entirety of the Pacific [Source]

TIL that a 2019 study found the Sahara Desert periodically turns green every 20,000 years due to small shifts in Earth’s orbit affecting rainfall patterns [Source]

TIL the longest lightning bolt ever recorded stretched about 829 km (515 miles), making it one of the largest electrical events ever measured on Earth. [Source]

TIL in the 80s, Nintendo of America had a strict rule that a third-party company could only publish up to five games a year for the NES in the US. Konami of America then got around this rule by forming a shell corporation called Ultra Games in 1988 to extend their annual library to ten games a year. [Source]

TIL in the 2000, an American-British consortium offered ABBA $1 Billion USD to do a 100-show tour, they declined. [Source]

TIL Felix Baumgartner, the man who jumped from the stratosphere during the Red Bull Stratos Project, died on the 17th of July, 2025 from a paragliding crash caused by human error. [Source]

TIL that American football resulted in enough fatalities and serious injuries by the early 20th century that it was almost banned. Through the combined efforts of several universities, the sport was reformed and saved and the predecessor of the NCAA was formed. [Source]

TIL magician Harry Houdini and his wife Bess created a secret code phrase (“Rosabelle, believe”) so she could verify any message from him after death. After Houdini died in 1926, Bess held séances for 10 years but concluded no real message came through. [Source]

TIL there is a rare carnivorous caterpillar in Hawaii nicknamed the “Bone Collector.” It lives inside spider webs and decorates its silk case with the dismembered heads, wings, and legs of its prey to camouflage itself from the "landlord" spider. [Source]

TIL about Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive treatment where doctors place a magnetic coil against the scalp to send magnetic pulses into the brain, stimulating nerve cells to help treat depression when other treatments haven’t worked [Source]

TIL that gachapon machines were invented in the US in the 1880s, originally contained postcards and gum. In Japan, Ryzuo Shigeta received these machines and used toys instead, thus the modern gachapon machines. [Source]

TIL Grave of the Fireflies is based on the author's own experiences as a child and was written as a personal apology for not being able to save his younger sister Keiko. [Source]

TIL The United States attempted permanent Daylight Savings Time in 1974. They retracted the law within a year. [Source]

TIL after Haitians won their freedom from France, they were forced to pay their former slave owners compensation for the “loss” of their own bodies. This debt took over a century to pay off, crippled Haiti’s economy and France has yet to pay it back. [Source]

Today I learned that in November 2025, a raccoon walking on the ceiling of a liquor store fell into the store when the roof collapsed, went on a drunken rampage, and later passed out on the bathroom floor. [Source]