› added 6 years ago

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TIL that in 1657 Otto von Guericke, having pumped the air from two copper hemispheres, creating a vacuum, showed that two teams of horses could not pull apart "nothing at all."

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yorv TIL Before Alfonso Cuarón directed the third Harry Potter film, he assigned the three leads to write a first person autobiographical essay about their character. Rupert Grint didn’t write his, saying ‘I’m Ron; Ron wouldn’t do it.’ Cuarón replied 'Okay, you do understand your character.’
p8mvN TIL many Jews fought back against the Nazis. Eta Wrobel escaped transport to a concentration camp and helped organize a resistance group. Refusing to just cook and clean, she carried a weapon on patrols and set mines to destroy German vehicles. Once, she dug a bullet out of her own leg with a knife.
VB0n8 TIL of Feretron dance - a tradition of moving (bowing) a feretron, mobile relgious icon, in a dancing manner. It originates from Wejherowo Poland and is still practiced today.
dD7ZK TIL that cartoonist Charles Schulz wanted to call his comic strip "Li'l Folks", but had to use the title "Peanuts" instead for trademark reasons. He always hated the name, which he described as "miserable", and he complained that "it has no dignity and it's not descriptive".
1aQnO TIL: Mormons/LDS church baptized Hitler, Elvis, Ann Frank, Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II, Ghandi, and others into their religion because their religion knows neither shame nor respect for other persons systems of belief. If you died famous, they’ve done “baptisms for the dead” on you already.