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TIL about a baseball team that literally played for their lives. An integrated team of death-row inmates was assembled, called The Penitentiary All Stars, played against other local teams in Wyoming, and earned the prison officials money from gambling. Winning earned the team stays of execution.

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BrlKW TIL when you imagine something, you are using the same brain processes as when you remember something, which is why it's so easy to misremember things, or why some people confuse what they've imagined with what is real.
0Ewj TIL the first solar cell developed had less than 1% conversion efficiency, and was denounced as a fraud by the USA for “generating power without consuming matter, violating the laws of physics.”
1anMO TIL that in 1945, at the United Nations Conference on International Organisation, the USSR requested that all 15 Soviet Republics be made members of the UN to better represent the people of the east. The US countered this by requesting that all 50 US states be made members of the UN.
4XY0g TIL for much of the 1800s in the UK, Sunday and Monday were the unofficial weekend, with Sunday for Church and Monday being adopted by workers as an unofficial holiday, mockingly called "St. Monday" (like a religious holiday). By the late 1800s, Monday became a workday, and Saturday a half workday.
awlAZ TIL of the Second Summer of Love, a 1980s British social phenomenon that consisted of the rise of acid house music and unlicensed rave parties. The term refers specifically to the summer of 1988, where there was a rise in use of the drug MDMA and mass free parties.