› added 9 years ago

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TIL that during the warring states period, the Han sent a water engineer to Qin to build an excessively expensive and pointless canal in order to drain their rival’s funds. However, the canal was a massive success and even today the area is very fertile.

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4XeLa TIL that an 18-year-old man lost his life saving a baby girl and her mother, during rampaging floods in the Philippines. He was swept away as he helped them reach cover. He’d already saved more than 30 people from the floodwaters and had helped evacuate his family.
nedMb TIL There was a proposal to make Ottawa's Rideau Street enclosed in a continuous glass-and-steel structure. The heated mall was expected to allow pedestrians to shop in comfort year-round. However, the downside was that it attracted large numbers of vagrants and late-night drinkers
PkGG TIL video game Buck Bumble was criticized for having foggy graphics. One critic defended it by pointing out that the game is set in England
yBBv TIL Robert Todd Lincoln was present, or near, 3 different presidential assassinations which prompted him to refuse a later presidential invitation with the comment “No, I’m not going, and they’d better not ask me, because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”
Rdrl TIL that Warner Bros held two test screenings of its animated movie “Thumbelina”. The first time around, the audience reaction was flat. For the next test, they prefaced the exact same footage with the Walt Disney logo. The test scores soared