› added 11 months ago

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TIL of Joe Arridy who was a 23-year-old man with an IQ score of 46 and the mind of a six-year-old who was wrongfully convicted and executed in 1939. He did not understand the meaning of the gas chamber, telling the warden "No, no, Joe won't die". He smiled while being taken to the gas chamber.

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PY9MZ TIL that Bob Widlar (uA702 creator) installed "The Hassler" outside his office. Whenever people started talking, the device would detect the audio, convert it to high freq, and playback the converted sound. Visitors would notice this ringing, stop talking, and the sound disappeared. Lesson learned.
8nrL TIL in 1963, a man in the Nevşehir Province of Turkey knocked down a wall of his home. Behind it, he discovered a mysterious room. The man continued digging … what he had discovered was the ancient Derinkuyu underground city, part of the Cappadocia region in central Anatolia, Turkey.
p8GLG TIL in 1981, a train engineer in India intentionally derailed his train to avoid hitting a cow, killing 600 people.
Ywrv TIL Iceland is extremely protective of their language, instead of loaning words from other languages they repurpose old ones, telephone is ‘simi’, meaning thread, jet plane is 'thota’, meaning to zoom and the word for computer, 'tölva’ translates to number priestess or numbers witch.
m1JpY TIL that Beck rejected Weird Al's request to parody his hit 1990s song "Loser" because Beck felt he already wasn't being taken seriously as artist. Later though, Beck regretted this decision saying “I think it would have been an amazing video. I’m actually really sad it didn’t happen.”