› added 6 years ago

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TIL a monk had erased and written over a book by Archimedes describing the foundations for calculus, centuries before Leibniz and Newton.

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9r8B TIL in 2005 Leonard Cohen sued his long-time manager for defrauding him of more than $US5 million, leaving him with just $150,000 from his 30-year career. The theft of almost all of his fortune forced Cohen to start touring again for the first time in 15 years at the age of 74.
EORo TIL that while filming the Shawshank Redemption, the American Humane Association objected that feeding the live maggot to the crow was inhumane towards the maggot, and required one be fed that had died from natural causes.
wode7 TIL: Sweden sold 1000 Volvo 144 cars and some other items to North Korea in the 1970s. North Korea never paid. North Korea still owes 2.2 billion Swedish kronor (234 million euros) to Sweden from these imports.
gMQv9 TIL some countries use semi-permanent ink in a finger to prevent voting more than once because they don't have a good people identification system to do that
Oxr1 TIL that all the bridges depicted on Euro banknotes are fictional so as not to show favouritism to member states - but then a guy in Holland decided to build them all.