› added 2 months ago

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TIL that Chinese businessman Zhang Biqing spent six years building a $130,000 artificial mountain villa on the roof of a Beijing high-rise apartment building. In 2013, following numerous complaints from neighbors, the Chinese government ordered Biqing to dismantle the two-story villa within 15 days.

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via reddit.com

ADYyg TIL after surviving the plane crash that killed three of his bandmates, Artimus Plyle (the drummer of Lynyrd Skynyrd) was shot in the shoulder by a farmer as he stumbled though a field with a group of survivors.
R7Ebj TIL opossums have 50 teeth – the most of any mammal. They are also the most varied in size of any mammal, with males in the northern range weighing up to twenty times as much as a female in the southern range.
160k8 TIL of Kurt Gerstein, a Nazi officer who tried to alert the world of the Holocaust while it was happening by sending detailed reports to Swedish, Swiss, Dutch and Catholic officials. These were largely ineffective and he died by suicide in 1945
vJMB TIL that in 1968 an American vessel was captured by North Korea. The crew was abused, and to show the world, they used puns (“We paean the DPRK [North Korea]. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung”) and gave the middle finger in propaganda photographs, claiming it was a “Hawaiian good luck sign”.
9wZRD TIL that if the salt in the ocean was removed and spread evenly over the Earth’s land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet (166 meters) thick, about the height of a 40-story office building.