› added 5 years ago

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TIL that the English "much" and Spanish "mucho" are derived from completely unrelated words. The apparent association is a phenomenon known as "false cognates."

Y76yP TIL in 1642, the birth of a "monstrous" one-eyed pig led the townspeople of New Haven, Connecticut to believe a local one-eyed man was the biological father. He was found guilty of bestiality and swiftly executed.
BrJL TIL when Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of stealing from Apple, Gates said, “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
mxEGo TIL Julius Caesar would personally conduct espionage on his enemies. Once, he even dressed up as a Gaul and snuck behind enemy lines. When his soldiers failed to sneak him back, he boarded a Gaul ship blockading the Romans and sailed back into Roman territory without anyone noticing.
GAyp7 TIL the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the neurologist, António Egas Moniz, who invented the lobotomy. However, this highly invasive procedure is now widely considered to be one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine.
9wOE7 TIL Estelle Peck faced a decision after her Japanese husband was incarcerated, stay with her husband of 13 years and be incarcerated or remain in Los Angeles alone. She chose to be with her husband, making her one of the few non-Japanese individuals incarcerated in these camps.