› added 10 months ago

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TIL that an ex-soldier, Tony Wittman raided an animal shelter, The Lost Dogs' Home, in Melbourne in 2021 to get his cat back. Armed with a toy gel riffle and in military gear, he took a worker hostage, demanding the cat's location. Wittman, later citing PTSD, was sentenced to six years in jail​.

5YVkp TIL: The term "Patient Zero" was a misunderstanding. It referred to a Canadian man named Gaëtan Dugas, who was linked to the AIDS epidemic in the '70s. He was a flight attendant that scientists dubbed "Patient O, the outside-of-California case". The O was later misinterpreted as the number 0.
P4JE TIL that in 2005, women from one of the poorest slums in Uganda spent two weeks breaking rocks to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The women, most of whom were displaced by civil war and who earned less than a dollar a day, contributed over $1,000 to the Katrina relief effort.
PRVZ TIL that During the financial crisis of 1720, known as the South Sea Bubble, the Houses of Parliament called for stockbrokers to be sewn into sacks filled with poisonous snakes and thrown into the River Thames
69ENm TIL that Texas Instruments has gone back and forth on how their calculators handle implicit multiplication with ambiguous notation, e.g. 8÷2(2+2). Different products will give different answers.
eZjE TIL of “Sailor Jerry Collins”, a tattoo artist who cured his own skin cancer by tattooing prescription meds, meant to be taken internally, directly on to malignant areas.