› added 7 years ago

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TIL that Frank Goldsmith, Jr., a Titanic survivor who later lived near Navin Field (Tiger Stadium) in Detroit, never took his children to baseball games because the roar of the crowd reminded him of the screams of people dying in the freezing water.

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YplWA TIL that the common ancestor of all fish had lungs, and that modern swim bladders in most fish are actually highly-derived lungs. In more oxygen-poor times hundreds of millions of years ago, being able to gulp down oxygen, which was more plentiful in air, was a huge evolutionary advantage.
0wBZM TIL of the Samaritan Revolts. Centuries after the Jewish Revolts, the Samaritans in fact became the majority demographic in the Holy Land and revolted against the Byzantines, resulting in nearly total annihilation and their modern obscurity.
0w4vj TIL of Christopher Knight who lived as a hermit for 27, never talking to or even meeting any other human. He survived by stealing from remote cabins, scattered in the wilderness of Maine.
nePd9 TIL The swastika (Sanskrit word and symbol) is a sacred Hindu symbol used since ancient times to represent prosperity and it was stolen by Hitler to convey his notion of superiority.
ZjvD TIL the Iraqi government spent $78m on bomb detectors that turned out to be glorified dowsing rods. The director of the UK-based company behind the devices was jailed for 10 years.