› added 7 years ago

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TIL Ed Smith created a fake student called George Burdell when Georgia Tech sent him two enrolment forms by mistake. He signed Burdell up for all his classes and did all his work twice with minor changes so teachers wouldn’t catch him. The school awarded Burdell a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.

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G4JG TIL that in 1873 a war broke out between Republicans and Democrats after both sides claimed they won the state election for Governor. Louisiana Democrats formed a “shadow” government, their own paramilitary force called the White League, and massacred more than 150 African Americans.
MeZyb TIL that Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, a blackface parody of Snow White, has been praised by animation historians, and has been included on lists of the greatest animated films ever - but is considered to have racism unparalleled in cartoon history, and has been banned from circulation since 1968
9YAJr TIL, Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of such Nintendo games as Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda, has a hobby of guessing the measurements of objects, then checking to see if he was correct. He enjoys the hobby so much he carries a tape measure with him everywhere.
4adb TIL Until the 1960′s, the only reliable pregnancy test was to inject a woman’s urine into a female African clawed frog. If the woman was pregnant, the frog would ovulate within 12 hours.
GYjW5 TIL the closest relatives to Primates, aside from flying lemurs and treeshrews, are rodents and lagomorths (rabbits, hares, pikas)