› added 11 years ago

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TIL in 1968 a US Army Batallion raped, maimed, and killed over 350 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children. Of the 26 soldiers charged, only one was convicted and only served 3.5 years in house arrest.

0dP5L TIL a remote northern Quebec mining town has a 1.3km long, 5 storey apartment building that serves as a windbreak for the rest of town and lets residents stay indoors all winter
mMmo TIL that one theory on why we are ticklish is that it serves as a mechanism for developing combat skills. Most often practiced from parent to child, tickling activates vulnerable areas on the body that develop a defensive reaction while producing laughter that encourages the ‘attacker’ to continue.
VMBKQ TIL that Iron Maiden's frontman Bruce Dickinson never got into drugs and showed his kids what people that got messed up by drugs looked like to let them judge for themselves.
QJxke TIL that statistical analysis of 6619 generals found that Napoleon Bonaparte had a Wins Above Replacement score (a statistical measure originating from baseball which determines a player's importance to victory) that was 23 standard deviations above the average general.
GYNeJ TIL Spain’s S-80 submarine program designed subs that were 70 tonnes too heavy, and likely sink when submerged. Cost overruns to fix it are expected to reach $9 billion. The problem was traced back to an engineer misplacing a decimal point, and had been called the most expensive math error ever.