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TIL the cuneiform writing system, which was used by humans for millennia, was indecipherable for more than 2000 years. A British army officer decoded the language in 1837 after recording and studying symbols he found in Persian cliff-sides.

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d8XpQ TIL that before Norm MacDonald's first appearance on the Tonight Show his dressing room was crashed by Robin Williams. While in the room he pretended to be a Jewish Tailor, talked to Norm's friend on the phone while pretending to be a Chinese Restaurant employee, dressed Norm, and then left.
BbD TIL the CERN ATLAS experiment generates 23 petabyte (in excess of 23 million Gigabytes) of raw data per second.
oYZK TIL that in Soviet Russia, rebellious teenagers who mimicked the Beatles’ hair were arrested and forced to have their hair cut in police stations
6Emel TIL that Argentina had the world's highest GDP per capita in the 1890's and was in the top fifteen wealthiest economies till the 1950's
rRYkM TIL for the first 40 million years that woody trees were around, wood was not biodegradable...until a fungus figured out how to rot it