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TIL: About the Trojan Room coffee pot at the University of Cambridge which is said to be the inspiration for the first webcam. In 1991 it put a live picture of the office coffee pot on peoples desktops pc’s of the local office LAN so people wouldn’t make a wasted trip.

Read more bbc.com

via reddit.com

Eaw0 TIL that the K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, has no local name. It is so remote and inaccessible that very few local people knew of its existence, and thus why it retains its original surveying moniker given to it by British surveyors.
kJ0we TIL Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, AKA ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for his torture of Jews and French resistance, was smuggled by the US to Bolivia for anticommunist work. For 30 years he also aided multiple dictatorial regimes, paramilitary groups, and even Pablo Escobar with security and torture services
VWXD TIL that a Black, Gay, Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin who educated MLK in Gandhian principles, made a famous speech in 1986 titled “The New Niggers Are Gay” emphasizing that gay people are most vulnerable social group and the new barometer for social change
v1dA7 TIL in 2000, two visiting Egyptologists found that a 2,700-year-old statue was unwittingly being used as a bike rack by staff in the basement of a Southampton museum. It had been ignored for a century.
X9yE TIL that Black and White American’s use different variations of sign language (American Sign Language and Black American sign Language) because like other schools, schools for the deaf and blind were also segregated. BASL is still taught in the South, despite segregation no longer existing.