› added 5 years ago

83

TIL That after winning the battle of Kleidion in 1014, the Byzantine Emperor Basil II took an estimated 14,000-15,000 prisoners, and punished them by sorting them into groups of a 100, then blinded 99 men in each one and left a single man in each with one eye so that he could lead the others home.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

Vex4 TIL One of the unsung heroes of 9/11 was a guide dog, Roselle, a yellow Labrador who led her blind owner, Michael Hingson, down 78 storeys of the North Tower and to the home of a friend.
RXy6 TIL that China’s army holds annual training exercises against a ‘Blue Force’ equipped to resemble a NATO adversary like the United States. The Blue Force nearly always wins; in 2014, only one visiting brigade was able to defeat it at the cost of 50% casualties.
e0rAk TIL that the Magikarp-Gyarados evolution is inspired by the Chinese myth that a carp that swims up the Dragon Gate waterfall on the Yellow River is transformed into a dragon.
nkL9 TIL there is a disease that strikes starfish “that causes the creatures’ arms to crawl in opposite directions until they tear away from the body, causing the insides to spill out.”
MeeP8 TIL 9th November is known as the ‘day of fate’ in German history- on the same day, Robert Blum was executed in 1848, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in 1918, Hitler’s Munich Putsch occurred in 1923, Kristallnacht occurred in 1938, and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.