› added 8 years ago

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TIL on April 5, 1943 the Destroyer USS O'Bannon encountered a Japanese submarine. Too close to fire their guns, the crew threw potatoes at the Japanses sailors, who thought they were grenades, distracting them long enough to get distance from the sub, fire their guns, and eventually sink it.

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EgQWx TIL Helen Keller was as a cofounder of the ACLU
Lkxe0 TIL Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel-Prize-winning discoverer of insulin, created the first private biological weapon research centre in 1940. Soon afterwards, the US government was also pressed to perform such research by their British allies who feared a German attack with biological weapons.
b6OY9 TIL Vanna White sued Samsung over a robot turning over letters in an ad exclaiming it violated her personal rights.
gMg57 TIL 86% of Holy Water is Teeming with E Coli and other bacteria found in fecal matter.
Wk86L TIL that in 2010, an 18-year-old Indonesian man was found having sex with a cow, who he claimed flirted with him. In order to cleanse the village of the act of bestiality, the man was forced to ritually marry the cow. The cow was then drowned in the ocean, and the man was also symbolically drowned