› added 8 months ago

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TIL Sir Paul Nurse, English geneticist and Nobel Prize winner, had his application for a US green card rejected due to the short-form UK birth certificate which he submitted not naming his parents. When he applied for a full birth certificate he discovered that his sister was actually his mother.

XyRE TIL that adults who were homeschooled often reference extreme social awkwardness as an obstacle they experienced upon entering college or the workforce. Others note astonishment and even anger towards their parents because they were shielded from scientific learning
OGyge TIL: The French in the 19th century developed Canne de combat, a fighting style that utilizes a cane. It was primarily used by the upper class. In WW2, there was a group that would used cane techniques to carry out assassinations. Unfortunately, the last masters of cane fighting are dying out.
R74vj TIL Alice Cooper has said he was inspired to write the song "School's Out" when answering the question, "What's the greatest three minutes of your life?" "If we can catch that three minutes in a song, it's going to be so big."
R78Aa TIL there is a race in Canada where people are racing in boats made of giant pumpkins.
VMyr0 TIL that the equivalent of the English-language idiom "comparing apples and oranges" in Serbian is "grandmothers and toads"; in Romanian it's "the grandmother and the machine gun" or "the cow and the longjohns"; and the equivalent Danish idiom is "What is highest, the Round Tower or a thunderclap?"