› added 5 years ago

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TIL 71% of 17-24-year-olds in the U.S. don't qualify for military service.

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69egw TIL a former professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley named Gregory Abbott became a musician and in 1987 topped the charts in the U.S. with his song "Shake You Down"
ZpmXR TIL that because the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures requires that because upper-case letters are only used for units named for people, Ken Woolner was inspired to create a scientist, Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, which would allow people to use L for litre and avoid mixing up l and 1
yZVa TIL that former prime minister of New Zealand, David Lange, once wrote in an opinion piece for a NZ military periodical: “Our military forces are an arm of government, just like the Department of Social Welfare, although probably less able to inflict widespread harm.”
m1vDP TIL: Sogen Kato was a Japanese man thought to have been Tokyo's oldest man until July 2010, when his mummified corpse was found in his bedroom.
o6QW TIL that when Richard Pryor hosted SNL in 1975, the NBC ordered the show to run on a 5-second delay due to Pryor being too controversial. Engineers later said they didn’t do this because nobody knew how to do it.