› added 9 years ago

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TIL the Danish government recreated the entire country of Denmark in Minecraft at a 1:1 scale, made of 4000 billion bricks. Players, exploiting a loophole, blew it up and planted an American flag.

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Wx7o TIL a French man on trial for witchcraft in the 1500’s decided to troll his accusers before being sentenced to death and declared that not only was he indeed a sorcerer, but there were more than 300,000 others in France alone, setting off mass hysteria across the country
AD16l TIL while the chloroplasts of nearly all known photosynthetic eukaryotes derive ultimately from the a single cyanobacterium taken in by a eukaryote a billion years ago, there are 3 species of amoeba which had taken on a cyanobacterium more recently and whose endosymbiont is called a chromatophore
wgAM TIL the band “They Might Be Giants” published an errata for their song, “Why Does the Sun Shine?” to address some factual errors called “Why Does the Sun Really Shine?”
NXeyJ TIL that words which take on completely different meanings when their first letter is capitalised (eg. Turkey the country vs turkey the bird) are called capitonyms
jeVM TIL in the 80s, when Al Gore’s wife ‘Tipper’ and her PMRC organization instituted a nation-wide campaign to sensor rock music in the US, Jello Biafa from the Dead Kennedys confronted her on the Oprah show and quite eloquently presented a case for Freedom of Speech in music.