› added 7 years ago

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TIL the US Public Health Service is a uniformed service that fights in the war against viruses and disease. It has its own official song, and the highest ranked officer in the service is the Surgeon General.

valr TIL that America has a set of giant stone slabs, etched with “rules” for post-apocalyptic humanity in many different languages. It can be used to chart the sun and stars, and warns against “petty laws and useless officials”. No one knows who funded creation of the monument.
9mb7 TIL that above 70 Manhattan Project scientists signed a petition(Szilard Petition) to President Truman to beg that the bomb should not be used on a civilian population in Japan.
kOQke TIL that the USA was never intended to be an actual democracy of the people. The Federalist Papers stated that the republic would exist "in the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share” of lawmaking.
p8wbb TIL before fame, Bruce Springsteen acquired his nickname "The Boss" because he took on the task of collecting the band's nightly pay from their club gigs and distributing it amongst his bandmates. Springsteen is not fond of this nickname, due to his dislike of bosses, but has tacitly accepted it.
woJeP TIL that Harry Houdini was always skeptical of the mediums that prayed on vulnerable people, so he tried to contact his dead mother, Cecelia, in 1922. It was a fail because the medium, Lady Doyle, wrote down what his mother was apparently saying in English, which was a language Cecelia did not know.