› added 4 years ago

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TIL that currently only two nations operate naval vessels classed as "cruisers": the United States and Russia, and in both cases the vessels are primarily armed with guided missiles.

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PYm7G TIL Frederick the Great and Voltaire once exchanged rebuses.
w9lP TIL that East St. Louis has a higher murder rate than Honduras, the country with the highest murder rate in the world
RGo1 TIL that David Bowie was next on Mark Chapman’s hitlist, after John Lennon. “Chapman had a front-row ticket to The Elephant Man the next night. John and Yoko were supposed to sit front-row for that show, too. So the night after John was killed there were three empty seats in the front row.”
0w9wN TIL Madame Tussaud, of Wax Museum fame, was an artist in the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. During the French Revolution, she was forced to make wax death masks of both of their faces immediately after they were guillotined.
aLX9 TIL there’s a probe orbiting Venus with a secondary mission: to find life on Earth. From Venus’s point of view, Earth is practically a pixel, which is exactly what exoplanets across the galaxy look like from Earth.