› added 6 years ago

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TIL that butter sticks are differently shaped and packaged differently depending on whether you live east or west of the Rocky Mountains.

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Bg6dr TIL Christians disapproved of the gladiator games in the Roman Empire because they involved idolatrous pagan rituals, and the popularity of gladiatorial contests declined in the fifth century, leading to their disappearance.
loO65 TIL heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt sued her mother and two surgeons in the 1930s for sterilising her during an appendectomy after declaring her a "moron", so that her mother could claim her inheritance if she died childless. She lost.
R5mD6 TIL that dBASE, the database software, was created to win football pools. It became so successful that its creator no longer had time to watch football games.
DyQp TIL that electricity was installed in the White House in 1891 during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison. He was so afraid of being electrocuted that he and his family never operated the light switches, always making his servants do it for them. He often slept with the lights on.
K9Vw TIL that discredited South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who falsely claimed to have extracted stem cells from cloned human embryos was, unbeknownst to himself at the time, actually the first to produce human embryos via parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction.