› added 1 year ago

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TIL that in 1990, on flight BA 5390, a poorly installed windshield blew off, partially sucking the captain out of the plane. The crew managed to hold onto him until they landed, and amazingly, he survived.

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R748 TIL the oldest company in the world, founded in year 578, went bankrupt and got sold in 2006.
OGJEe TIL There is a Chinese poem entitled "Shī-shì shí shī shǐ", with 92 words - all of which are "shi". The poem becomes comprehensible because Chinese is a tonal language - where the same word can be pronounced with many different tones. Supposedly, the poem is more sensible in Cantonese than Mandarin
VB5eQ TIL Hitler greatly admired the US ideology for territorial expansion (Manifest Destiny), and saw its destruction of Native American people and cultures as a template for German expansion (Lebensraum)
aw0WA TIL PT Barnum bought a blind, elderly slave with a shrunken appearance and toured the country with her while claiming she was 161 years old and had breastfed George Washington when he was a baby. When she died, Barnam then sold her to a surgeon and had her autopsy performed live on Broadway.
X5gk TIL self-taught naturalist Ray Stanford shocked paleontologists by routinely finding hundreds of dinosaur prints in suburban Washington DC where only a handful had been discovered before. He has a unique ability to recognize patterns and abnormalities in rock. He also claims seeing UFOs in clouds.