› added 8 years ago

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TIL Cuexcomate, near Puebla, Mexico, was thought to be the world’s smallest volcano at just 43ft tall, but was later found to be an empty cone of an extinct geyser. The Pueblans threw bodies of suicide victims into it & believed that if you lived around it, you were ‘under the rule of the devil.’

j6onR TIL in 1940, the UK proposed a UK-France merger, so the countries would be seen as a single country for the duration of WW2. This included shared citizenship, resources, defence, and policies. If the proposal was made just a few days earlier, there is belief it would have been carefully considered.
Lk5kp TIL the creator of Gillette was credited with saying "give 'em the razor; sell 'em the blades", a concept that later became a business model used by inkjet printers and game consoles
aowA TIL the US military once tried to build a radar detector-detector-detector detector in order to detect radar detector-detector-detectors, whose main purpose is to detect a radar detector detector, which were built to alert police to someone using an illegal radar detector
kOZw7 TIL: The tiny island of Ōkunoshima in Japan (otherwise known as Usagi Jima or "Bunny Island"), previously the WWII manufacturing site for thousands of tons of poison gas, is now home to hundreds of feral rabbits and nobody is quite sure where they came from.
kOWG7 TIL about The Carrington Event, the most powerful solar flare recorded. If this were to happen today, the impact on power grids, telecommunications, internet, crops, satellite communications and GPS systems would be $1 trillion to $2 trillion.