› added 11 years ago

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TIL artist Chuck Close, renowned for his large photo-realistic portraits, suffered a stroke at age 48 which left him paralyzed from the neck down. However, he continued painting, using chunks of paper, finger prints and paint blobs to create the same photo-realism effect, just at a lower resolution.

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oBdwY TIL the quote, "History is written by the victors" is widely misattributed to Winston Churchill and that the sentiment predates him by many years. The pronouncement on the nature of history was voiced earlier by people such as Hermann Göring and the Confederate Congressman George Graham Vest.
GMPN TIL Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone) survived a three story fall, a gunpowder explosion, drinking a bowl of sulfuric water, a near-poisoning due to furniture varnish, and falling into a speeding river - all before the age of nine. His neighbors called him “little Sax, the ghost.”
9w6M7 TIL that since 2004, countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and UAE have replaced camel jockeys with robot drones, to prevent children being exploited into riding camels. It also prevented race-fixing, and sharing winnings.
nendr TIL the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.
r5lx TIL Gin descends from a juniper liquor first distilled in Belgium or Holland. During the Thirty Years’ War, England’s army saw Dutch soldiers fortifying themselves for battle by drinking genever. They brought this so-called “Dutch courage” back home.