› added 6 years ago

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TIL that the story of Kitty Genovese's murder being ignored by 38 people is a myth and the police were called twice. One woman even went down and held her after she was stabbed. The myth came due to the NYT's writer wanting a more dramatic story.

E6lX TIL Human fingers can feel objects as small as 13 nanometers. “This means that, if your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses from cars.”
8oj8 TIL the Cali Cartel murdered so many people and dumped their bodies in the Cauca River that the local municipality was eventually bankrupt by the cost of recovering corpses and conducting autopsies.
WPP9 TIL that the FBI ran COINTELPRO, an illegal series of projects operated to suppress “subversive” movements like civil rights (including MLK) or growing third parties. These targets faced tricks like psychological warfare, killings (together with police departments), and slander through newspapers.
RKR8 TIL about Blockbusting, a method used during the “white flight” era, where real-estate agents would fake a black person moving into a white neighborhood to scare the rest of the residents into hastily selling their houses at a loss. They then charged high prices selling the houses to black families
x6NJB TIL Johann Bücheler built Switzerland's first guillotine in 1836 after another carpenter became depressed. He earned 160 francs but became an outcast. To earn some money he build a bonsai guillotine and beheaded celery.