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TIL Sir Isaac Newton convicted 28 coiners for counterfeiting, including one of the largest Con Men of his time.

A7wx TIL after hearing Kennedy’s “end of the decade” speech, an Englishman made a wager with a bookmaker of 10 pounds at 1000/1 “that a man will set foot on the surface of the moon before the first of January 1970.” He thought it was “a common sense bet.”
9Y9OD TIL of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a wealthy financier who provided financing to German royalty. Around 1800, he sent his five sons to five European cities (London, Vienna, Frankfurt, Naples, and Paris) to establish their own banking franchises, founding the Rothschild banking dynasty.
W1N8 TIL that Sandy Springs, a suburb of Atlanta, has entirely outsourced its government to a private company (CH2M) because being a wealthier area they didn’t want their tax dollars supporting less affluent neighborhoods
D1BGD TIL that one of the victims who lost his house in the 1991 Oakland Firestorm was game designer Will Wright. He used the experience of rebuilding his life as basis for the concept of The Sims, and added the city's recovery from the fire as a scenario in the game SimCity 2000.
b9mm0 Today I learned, after airspace was closed after the attacks of 9/11, 38 planes were diverted to a large dormant airport in Newfoundland Canada and the residents of Gander in Newfoundland welcomed in nearly 7,000 people into their homes and schools to stay while they where stranded for 6 days.