› added 5 years ago

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TIL Iron Maiden lead singer, Bruce Dickinson is considered a polymath by Intelligent Life magazine due to excelling in a wide variety of pursuits. He is a commercial pilot, presented shows on radio and TV, written novels, brews his own beer and was once ranked 7th in Great Britain for fencing.

WMKo TIL that the US Gov’t took the land on which Mt Rushmore was built from the Sioux nation, and developed Mt. Rushmore on sacred Sioux grounds without any compensation. The US Gov’t has offered over 1 Billion Dollars in compensation, but the Sioux refuse to take it, saying the land was never for sale.
p84b TIL red sapphires are so rare, they’re given another name: rubies
Kdw TIL that Albert Michelson, celebrated for his work in discovering the speed of light, got a free education at the US naval accademy just because he hung out by the door to the Whitehouse and went (initially uninvited) for daily morning walks with the President (Grant).
4XKZR TIL in one of hundreds of his dangerous visits to the Chernobyl disaster site, nuclear inspector Artur Korneyev was able to take a photo of himself in 1996 near the Elephant Foot, a radioactive mass that initially gave off more than 10,000 roentgens an hour
VB7Nk TIL in the 1980s Bill Benter developed a statistical model that identified factors that could lead to making successful Hong Kong horse racing predictions. As one of the most successful analysis computer software programs in the horse racing market, it helped Benter win nearly $1 billion.