› added 5 years ago

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TIL Taylor Swift was born into wealth. Her father is "from three generations of bank presidents" and worked for Merrill Lynch. At the age of 14 her family moved to Nashville where her father purchased a stake in Big Machine, the label to which Swift first signed.

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O144 TIL - A family has been carving a 64 story Crazy Horse memorial out of a South Dakota mountain for 70 years
p8MJ8 TIL the Reichstag, which fell into disrepair after World War II but was rebuilt after the reunification of Germany, contains Soviet graffiti as "historical reminders," including one which reads "I fuck Hitler in the ass."
wGMY TIL that although the U.S. carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia killed tens of thousands of people, it was officially denied for over 30 years
8ZR8 TIL Of a mechanism from Ancient Greece, similar to an analogue computer, where you could input data and it would give you the planets and stars positions, and could foresee eclipses and moon phases.
wLKYY Werner de Gier, a biology student at Leiden University, and shrimp expert Charles Fransen were faced with the prospect of naming a newly discovered shrimp with hairy legs. They did what any self-respecting scientists would do and named it after Bilbo Baggins, the hairy-footed hobbit from The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series.