› added 7 years ago

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TIL when the Northridge Earthquake caused a massive power outage in L.A. in 1994, panicked residents called 911 to express alarm about a strange ethereal light overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way Galaxy for the first time.

VM70B TIL President Dwight D Eisenhower had four American heroes and one was General Robert E Lee. He hung four portraits in his office and one was Lee's; the others were President Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, President Washington and Lee.
a8Evy TIL that the reason printers refuse to print without yellow ink is because they print a Machine Identification Code on every page, leaving a unique microscopic pattern of yellow dots that say what the serial number and model of the printer is, allowing the documents to be traced back to the owner.
e0P1k TIL Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Enigma ending WWII at least two years early and saving ~11M lives, was a gay man. He was later arrested for being a homosexual and sentenced to chemical castration. Turing mysteriously died of cyanide poisoning.
kKgW TIL World record for the highest fall without a parachute belongs to an air hostess named Vesna Vulovic. She survived 33,333 feet as she was nestled between a catering trolley, a dead body and the tail section of the plane. The first thing she asked for after waking up from coma was a cigarette!
b9D59 TIL Abdol Hossein Sardari is credited with saving thousands of Jews in Europe, and given the title "Schindler of Iran"