› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Peter the Great implemented a beard tax in hopes of modernizing Russia. People who payed the tax were given a token that said “the beard tax has been taken” and “the beard is a superfluous burden”.

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aJ9Z TIL Baylor University has 2 live black bears that live on campus and used to go to football games. The school stopped taking them there only after the USDA banned them from doing so.
5VoMQ TIL ex-British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, helped invent soft scoop ice cream.
W7obo TIL a scientist hired his family to refine radium in their basement for 20 years, with the waste buried in the backyard. The property was declared a Superfund site and cost $70M to clean up. His body was exhumed for testing and had the largest amount of radioactive material ever detected in a human.
xAA7 TIL that mathematician Paul Erdős published so many papers during his lifetime that there exists the Erdős number scale which measures the “collaborative distance” between Erdős and other mathematicians. Over 130,000 mathematicians have an Erdős number.
LkgR0 TIL Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is the most played song at funerals in the United Kingdom.