› added 10 years ago

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TIL A whip makes its cracking noise because the whip’s tip breaks the sound barrier and what you hear is actually a small sonic boom.

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Ooaga TIL original wild bananas contained large seeds, but humans bred them to have tiny seeds for easier consumption.
4N1X TIL From 1995-2000 a man stole the pieces to the top winning prizes from McDonald’s Monopoly and gave them to associates which claimed and shared the prizes totaling over $24M. One year he sent the $1M piece to a Children’s Hospital, although against the rules, McDonald’s honored the prize.
DQKnp TIL that okra features heavily in Caribbean, Indian and Nigerian cooking. It is a much more widespread vegetable than I had first assumed
R7LY6 TIL In 1979 Sir William Arthur Lewis won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, becoming the first black person to win a Nobel Prize in a category other than peace
pNde TIL that in 1997, four years before being arrested for spying for the KGB, Robert Hanssen was caught using a password cracker on a federal computer. When asked about this, he said that he was simply trying to install a color printer, and so he needed the administrator password. They believed him.