› added 7 years ago

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TIL that when the pirate Klaus Störtebeker and 10 of his companions were executed, a senator asked the executioner if he was tired after this, but he replied he could easily execute the whole of the senate as well. The senate sentenced him to death for that and a senator himself executed him.

lk9B TIL that cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and others are all technically the same plant. Through history, different cultures bred the plant to express different qualities, creating the varied cultivars we see today.
a5M TIL that toshiba programmed a robot to “love”. It later had to be deactivated due to “stalking” an engineer.
vwO4 TIL in 2007 a Doberman Pinscher named Khan saved a baby girl from a deadly King Brown snake attack. At first the dog tried nudging the baby from danger. As the snake was about to strike, Khan grabbed the girl by the diaper, flung her to safety and took a venomous bite to the paw himself.
e6En TIL that the United States has been on the metric system since 1975 through the Metric Conversion Act, declaring that the metric system is “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce”
Eg9Od TIL Leonardo da Vinci designed a 12-barreled rapid-fire type of machine gun which was intended to be both lightweight and quite mobile on the battlefield. While he worked on such weapons for the benefit of his patrons, he also did so out of intellectual curiosity.