TIL in 2014, passengers were warned three times not to eat nuts on a Ryanair flight due to a 4-year-old girl's severe nut allergy, but a passenger sitting four rows away from the girl ate nuts anyway. The girl went into anaphylactic shock, and the passenger was banned from the airline for two years. [source, comments]
TIL that Foot Binding, the practice of breaking and binding a woman's feet to change its shape and size, was once so widespread in China that it was estimated in the 19th century that 40~50% of all Chinese women had bound feet. Among upper class Han Chinese women, the figure was almost 100%. [source, comments]
TIL that the R-colored vowel (the “-er” sound in “butter,” as pronounced in North American English) is rare in languages, occurring in less than 1% of them. However, those languages include North American English and Mandarin Chinese, two of the most widely-spoken languages on earth. [source, comments]
TIL Piero Calamai, the captain of the Andrea Doria, felt abandoned, vilified & ashamed to have tarnished the name of the long line of Calamai men who had a distinguished naval career. In 1972, he admitted himself to the hospital complaining of malaise. His last words were “Are the passengers saved?” [source, comments]
TIL Originally, Sid's character in Ice age (2002) was supposed to be a con-artist and a hustler, and there was a finished scene of the character conning some aardvark kids. His character was later changed to a talkative-clumsy sloth because the team felt the audience would have disliked him. [source, comments]
TIL that in 1982, Ozzy Osbourne's tour bus driver Andrew Aycock, guitarist Randy Rhoads, and makeup artist Rachel Youngblood were killed while riding a small plane Aycock was flying low over the bus in attempt to wake up the band, which he passed twice before clipping a wing and going into a spiral [source, comments]