3 Mindblowing Random Facts I Learned From Reddit

Culture

Need to fill your brain with strange, yet fascinating facts? Leave it to the growing Reddit community to assemble a series of strange yet true facts that'll blow your mind. "Today I Learned..." is and equal opportunity weird collection of bizarre facts. You'll read up on loonies from history, insane acts of nature and things you just plain didn't know about.

Here's a quick sampling of what to expect. Again, according to TIL, everything you see is true, take that for what you will.

1. General Braxton Bragg: A man so tough he got into a fight with himself.

Commander of the Tennessee Confederate Army for only one year, General Braxton Bragg would go down in Civil War history as incompetent, ineffectual and borderline crazy. Despite being hated by his men and routinely chewed out by his superiors, General Bragg was also an insane stickler for rules and regulations. So much so that, during a brief time as both company commander and quartermaster, he started an argument with himself via a series of letters.

As his superior put it: "My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself."

2. Be there in a jiffy, scientifically speaking.

Funny where terms and words come from. According to "Today I Learned," the term "jiffy," was coined by Physical Chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis. According to Lewis, a jiffy is a the unit of time it takes for light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum. Even today, jiffy is used as a unit of time measurement by electrical engineers and computer scientists. Much like Lewis' original idea, a jiffy is still a minuscule amount of time and distance.

Maybe next time it would be best not to say "jiffy," anymore. Lest something think you'll arrive instantaneously.

3. Oh, another majestic sunrise, yawn.

Imagine being on the Mir, or the International Space Station. Floating in the low gravity, with only a small window to the outside world, Earth's cycle leaving the planet in a state of pitch black. But gradually, a beam of intense light pierces through the shadows, illuminating across the globe in a beam and then a wave of glorious light.

Of course, you're ignoring this, you've got things to do.

Welcome to the life of astronauts, where a sunrise and a sunset happen every 45 minutes. Bor-ring.

Honestly, there's only so much majesty a person can take.

That's only a smattering of what TIL has on a daily basis. So give it a click and educate yourself.