› added 1 year ago

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TIL that this is how American school children addressed the flag during the pledge until 1942, when it was changed to the hand over the heart.

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JYa9k TIL that in 1953, a North Korean fighter pilot defected to South Korea with his MiG-15 and was rewarded $100,000 from the United States
PYnrg TIL that the first thing that was ever bought and sold over the internet was weed. In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford's AI Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at MIT, and thus the first act of e-commerce was a pot deal.
9YAVm TIL the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria wasn’t a great loss of historical texts. The majority of the library’s scrolls had been copied for libraries in Persia, Byzantium, and Iraq; Its believed the study of these texts helped form universities through Europe in the Early Middle Ages
ddlE TIL of Ryōji Uehara, a Japanese Kamikaze pilot whose last letter written the night before his final mission is considered a masterpiece of Japanese literature.
rNkWw TIL Jalapeños from major US agriculture companies have been intentionally bred to be less spicy because their largest buyers (other food manufacturers) prefer them as mild as possible so they can add capsaicin extract and have direct control over the spice level.