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TIL that Ken Jennings would have lost his first game on Jeopardy if not for a technicality allowing players to write only the last name of the correct response in Final Jeopardy. Jennings went on to win 74 games and over $2.5 million, eventually becoming the show's "Greatest of All Time" contestant.

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d8geQ TIL that between years 4000 and 3500 BCE the Tripolye culture centered around modern Moldova in Eastern Europe have built the largest settlements in the world at the time, inhabited by 20,000 to 46,000 people. Cities of this size only reappeared in Mesopotamia a millenium later.
b9W0 TIL that in the novel Slumdog Millionaire is based on, the hero’s real goal is to get close enough to the game show host to assassinate him
KYeP9 TIL: Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters of the British Post Office were wrongfully prosecuted for supposed "financial irregularities" and 13 of them ended up committing suicide. The "financial irregularities" were in fact caused by a bug in the accounting software.
QJ849 TIL that the refrain "Mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah from "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" by Michael Jackson was taken from "Soul Makossa", a song by Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango. The song was considered one of the first disco records, and became an underground hit in the early 70s.
WAJA TIL that a dog that chased away a suicide bomber in Afghanistan and saved the lives of 50 US soldiers was accidently euthanized in a dog shelter in Arizona.