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TIL when a man asked Xerxes to exempt his eldest son from serving in the army, he had the young man cut in half and ordered his army to march between his two parts

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m1O9Y TIL about the doorway effect a known psychological event where a person's short-term memory declines when passing through a doorway moving from one location to another when it would not if they had remained in the same place.
QNVNk TIL that Buzz Aldrin was known among his fellow astronauts to be very difficult to work with, to the point that Neil Armstrong was offered the chance to replace Aldrin with someone else for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Armstrong thought it over for a day before choosing to stick with Aldrin.
myBR TIL 100 years ago the Battle of Messines began with the detonation of 19 mines under German front lines which killed 10,000 troops in 20 seconds, considered the deadliest non-nuclear, man-made explosion in history.
0XZM TIL that during the Seige Of Malta, the Ottoman Turks tried to intimidate the Knights Hospitaller by executing their prisoners and floating them into the bay on crucifixes. The Knights responded by decaptating their prisoners and using cannons to fire their severed heads into the Turkish camp
RB51 TIL Texas abolished “Last Meal” before execution because a prisoner, Lawrence Russell Brewer, requested a 5 course meal and ate nothing of it because he “wasn’t hungry after all”