› added 10 years ago

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TIL early firefighters weren’t paid with cash, instead they first grabbed all valuable items out of the victims house or business, then would sell those items or keep them for themselves.

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via reddit.com

pYAP8 TIL the first Scram button on a nuclear reactor had its origins in 1942 where an actual control rod tied to a rope with a man with an axe stood next to it; cutting the rope would mean the rods would fall by gravity into the reactor core, shutting the reactor down.
yQ8nV TIL that Koko the signing gorilla liked human nipples so much that three staff members sued the organization that housed her for being forced to reveal their nipples to Koko.
rRaBw TIL that Ramanujan's lost notebook, discovered 56 years after his death, contained the mock theta functions that have been found to be useful for calculating the entropy of black holes. The unordered sheets contained over six hundred mathematical formulas listed consecutively without proofs.
jdEE TIL the Chicago Tribune, New Yorker, Boston Globe, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette all gave Season 1 of “Breaking Bad” a negative review.
JYok8 TIL: The rarest eye and hair color combination in the world is blue and ginger, only 0.17% of the population have this combination.