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TIL that the phone system's three rising tones (Special Information Tone, or SIT) comes in 8 varieties that are similar but can be distinguished by electronic equipment. It was designed so equipment could identify the error, even without understanding the spoken message.

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7rdKM TIL "Mad" Mike Hughes died after crashing in his homemade steam powered rocket. He launched from the California desert and hoped to reach the Kármán Line, where Earth's atmosphere meets outer space 62 miles above the ground to prove that the Earth is a flat disk and not a sphere.
KNAJ TIL that Ernest Hemingway lived through anthrax, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, skin cancer, hepatitis, anemia, diabetes, high blood pressure, two plane crashes, a ruptured kidney, a ruptured spleen, a ruptured liver, a crushed vertebra, and a fractured skull.
LMxV TIL in 2006, the Indy Car Series switched over to Honda engines and since then, there have been no Indy Car engine failures.
Bgvjd TIL: Viking-era Scandinavians believed every person had a sort of luck spirit that could leave the body under extreme circumstances. The English saying that someone’s luck has run out is actually an adaptation of a Norse proverb. But when the Norse said it, they meant it literally.
b9G8E TIL that the Oscar-winning screenplay for Sense and Sensibility (1996) was almost lost due a bug on Emma Thompson’s computer. Desperate, she asked her longtime friend Stephen Fry for help, who spent seven hours recovering the script.