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TIL That during and the French Revolution there was an attempt by various governments to remove all traces of Christianity from the country. It was known as Dechristianisation

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DjZY TIL That in 2010, a band of Somali pirates attempted to capture the US Navy Frigate USS Nicholas, mistaking it for a merchant vessel
x9pb TIL Charlie Chaplin would have canned The Great Dictator had he known about the actual horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at the time. “Had I known, … I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”
8agK4 TIL in 2012 numerous government officials in Mali were detained by a military Junta after a Coup. There has been no update on the condition of these prisoners since.
7BDL TIL that young Greek hoplites (citizen soldiers) had to dress in heavy armor and run a foot race of 1,300 ft in the Olympics. This was done to develop the battlefield tactic of rushing to the Persian lines in rapid pace so as to counter their archers.
rRaBw TIL that Ramanujan's lost notebook, discovered 56 years after his death, contained the mock theta functions that have been found to be useful for calculating the entropy of black holes. The unordered sheets contained over six hundred mathematical formulas listed consecutively without proofs.