› added 1 year ago

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TIL: Uzbekistan is one of the few countries with a high speed rail system. It's bullet trains can reach 250km/(160mph) along 600km of rail

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GOPQ TIL a strand of spider silk long enough to encircle the whole Earth would weigh only just over a pound
woEwJ TIL Not to use hand air dryers in public restrooms 🦠
nedOB TIL about the “Three Finger Rule” - that people can generally only open their mouth as wide as three of their own fingers stacked on top of each other. This rule can help you know if food (such as a burger) is too large to comfortably bite.
KOMwQ TIL East Germans defected by various ways like digging long tunnels under the Berlin Wall, waiting for favorable winds and taking hot air balloons, sliding along aerial wires, flying ultralight aircraft and, in one case, driving a sports car at full speed through the basic, initial fortifications.
0wnGy TIL Scrooge's famous cry for the poor to die and thereby 'decrease the surplus population' was most likely a reference to Thomas Malthus who had written a generation before about the economic dangers of a lack of war, plague and famine.