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TIL that while young Robert E. Lee worked surveying the boundary between Ohio and Michigan, he jokingly referred in a letter to a snake he killed in a lighthouse as the lighthouse's keeper. Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman misinterpreted this as an admission that Lee killed a human keeper.

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GBB4 TIL Salman Rushdie loves Super Mario World. He played the game religiously while he was in hiding, to the great annoyance of his wife.
p8xZG TIL of Eilmer of Malmesbury. An English monk who, in the 11th century, developed a glider and flew ~200m high. However, a gush of wind crashed him and left him crippled for the rest of his life. He wrote later in life that the reason for the crash was not developing a tail component to the glider.
X0JjX TIL Nintendo characters Mario, Kirby, and Zelda were all named after real people.
gy8L TIL that when we get nervous, we overestimate how much other people notice our anxiety, due to the “Illusion of Transparency”. Luckily, studies show that simply being aware of this cognitive bias can make you more confident.
LZMV TIL a US army major was discharged for asking if nuclear launch could legally be ordered by an insane president. Legal scholars have since concluded that it can.