› added 1 year ago

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TIL that Madame Tussaud's skill at making wax replicas of people is what saved her from the French Revolution's Guillotine.

Read more theguardian.com

via reddit.com

awjl9 TIL Prisoners in Brazil can shorten their sentence by reading and writing a report on a book
wo81 TIL that if the North Koreans used their largest nuclear bomb on the Empire State Building, it wouldn’t even reach Central Park
EgO6o TIL TVs were banned in Bhutan until June of 1999
LkQjV TIL NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia banned pinball in the 1940s as gambling that emptied the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money". All pinball machines were rounded up and smashed dramatically by the mayor, before being dumped into city rivers.
OgVe TIL that the saying ‘to take with a grain of salt" comes from Pliny the Elder, who wrote about an antidote for a certain poison, having as one of its ingredients a measure of salt. He thought that if an antidote involved salt, then the poison itself should be regarded less seriously than normal.