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TIL that the 1971 Doors song "Riders on the Storm" partially references an American hitchhiking killer, Billy "Cockeyed" Cook in its lyrics. In 1950-51, Cook murdered six people, including a family of five, on a 22-day rampage between Missouri and California.

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yQjAM TIL that there have been several cases of whale carcasses bursting due to a buildup of gas in the decomposition process. In Nov 1970, when a dead whale was about to burst, a team blew it up using dynamite in an attempt to dispose of it. The explosion threw whale flesh over 800 feet (240 M) away!
OoGOX The sky appears blue for a combination of two reasons. Before white light reaches the Earth's surface, the light waves collide with and bounce off of the nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere. Different frequencies of light (in other words different colours) are scattered differently. Higher frequencies (blue and purple) are more easily scattered and thus bounce around in all different directions more than lower frequencies (red or orange) do. The scattering of high frequencies alone would cause the sky to appear blue and purple, but our eyes work better at frequencies near the middle of the spectrum (yellow and green). Since the colour blue is closer to yellow or green than purple is, the sky we see appears blue.
wmbo TIL that in North Korea there is little stigma attached to using meth. “If you go to somebody’s house it is a polite way to greet somebody by offering them a sniff” said one North Korean.
Z8Lo TIL that Ayn Rand spent the last 6 years of her life on Social Security and Medicare, after a lifetime of condemning both programs.
pM4A TIL there is a small, one-story building in Wilmington, Delaware which serves as the official address of nearly 300,000 companies. Up to 200,000 are believed to be shell companies.