› added 6 years ago

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TIL the tradition of firing guns as a salute was originally a sign of peaceful intentions. Since guns and cannons needed to be reloaded after each shot, firing your gun in the air essentially rendered you "unarmed."

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via reddit.com

bbLQ TIL that during the battle of Wizna, 800 polish soldiers held off 42,000 nazi soldiers for 3 days. Once the poles ran out of bullets, their commander threw himself on a grenade instead of surrendering. The battle is referred to as the Polish Thermopylae.
M78rb TIL in 2005, a L.A. Dodgers pitcher offered the Miami Marlins batboy $500 if he could drink a gallon of milk in under an hour without throwing up. The batboy drank the milk in 59 minutes but threw up outside the clubhouse. The episode prompted the Marlins to suspend the batboy for 6 games.
XEDLk TIL Corona never paid to be in Fast and the Furious but received an estimated $15 million in free advertising.
xv7o TIL when Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd read in a newspaper that a family was killed because of a faulty seal in their refrigerator (with toxic ammonia),they decided that they would invent a refrigerator without moving parts,hence no seals. This became the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator
p8Aoe TIL that in 1999 Linux users protested infront of a Microsoft building to get their version of Windows 98 refunded which was bound to purchasing a PC. This shed some light on the rather scummy refund procedure Microsoft had but in the end no one got their money back.