› added 9 years ago

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TIL a boat named the “Eastland” sank three years after the Titanic because of new laws which required more life boats. The boat became too top heavy and sank, killing over 800 people.

pA4Q TIL that Kyoto was spared from much of the destruction of WWII. It was removed from the atomic bomb target list (which it had headed) by the personal intervention of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who wanted to save this cultural center that he knew from his honeymoon.
9YZm7 TIL that the quote “A jack of all trades is a master of none,” has actually been shortened. The original quote is “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one.” The original quote meant the opposite of the current one.
dDVY8 TIL that the Catcholic Church still excommunicates people, with the last excommunication being in 2020, when Jeremy Leatherby, a priest in Sacramento, refused to recognize the legitimacy of Pope Francis.
9Ar7 TIL the mysterious 120-ton boulder walls of an ancient fortress in Sacsayhuaman, Peru have survived thousands of years, including earthquakes, in part because they are “fit together with such precision you can’t fit a piece of paper between them”
nPkb TIL that during WWII, the British, learned of a German radio navigation system codenamed ‘Wotan’. Wotan, or Odin, was a one-eyed Norse god, whence they deduced that the system used one beam, and were able to develop countermeasures before the system was even deployed.