› added 4 years ago

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TIL That Queen Victoria used to take cocaine and once took the drug with Winston Churchill when he was young.

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Nrd8 TIL Luis von Ahn took CAPTCHA (the squiggly silly words you type when you sign up for something online) and turned it into a worldwide mass text deciphering tool, using people like you and I to digitize all the books that exist in the world, one word at a time.
Z8rRv Today I learned that during the preparation for the Apollo 11 mission, those going aboard the spacecraft took poetry lessons, to be able to creatively convey what it felt like on the moon.
woYDo TIL in early 1942 the Battle of Los Angeles was fought, with an hour-long barrage of anti-aircraft artillery fired from the city against a perceived Japanese invasion. The cause: a stray weather balloon.
p87p4 TIL The phone number from Glenn Miller bands song "Pennsylvania 6-5000", is still in use, and is in fact the oldest working phone number. Has been working since 1930's. It connects you to Hotel Pennsylvania.
GO84 TIL of French Treasury Chief Etienne de Silhouette, whose penny-pinching ways inspired the term ‘à la Silhouette’ for things perceived as austere. These included a newly popular form of portraiture using a shadow profile cut from black paper.