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TIL that a fringe rationalist ‘death cult’ in the Bay Area—whose members were talented data scientists from NASA, Google, and Oxford—faked their leader’s drowning, lived in box trucks armed with samurai swords, and are now linked to as many as six deaths across multiple states.

9GeM TIL about Schmidt won Jack Nicholson the 2003 Golden Globe award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama. Upon accepting his award, Nicholson quipped: “I’m a little surprised. I thought we made a comedy.”
GYRW1 TIL the world's first emergency phone number was launched in London in 1937. It initially only covered a radius of 12 miles. The 999 number was chosen due to the ease of dialing it on phones at that time.
4LKJ TIL that in 1983 a skull fragment was found in a bog in England and was reported to the authorities. They then pulled in a man suspected of murdering his wife who confessed to the act. The fragment was found to have belonged to a woman that died in 250 CE and the man was still tried and convicted.
XELpX TIL: A court once ruled in favour of a landlord who evicted a tenant for spreading surströmming brine in a stairwell after the landlord opened a can of it in court to show how bad it smelled
0dZ7M TIL In 1944, Helen Martini was hired as the Bronx Zoo's first female keeper after successfully raising 3 tiger cubs. She was famous for treating animals in her Bronx apartment-sometimes despite the complaints of neighbors-including gorillas, marmosets, baby deer, antelope, squirrels, and skunks.