› added 11 years ago

73

TIL Ozzy Osbourne deliberately married his second wife, Sharon Arden, on the Fourth of July so that he would never forget their anniversary.

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xoyk TIL a Swedish man built a homemade nuclear reactor and had a meltdown on the kitchen stove
BAlK TIL that after Kirani James won Grenada’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in 2012, the country was so proud that the government held a giant 3-hour celebratory rally attended by thousands, gave him US$186,000, printed new stamps, named a new stadium after him, and built a museum/gym in his home town.
GbK5 TIL Iranians still use the ancient form of air conditioning called the badgir. It is a tower with vents on top and allows cool air to accelerate down into a building. Zion National Park in Utah has a modern example of this, where temps reach over 100 F, the visitors center stays at cool 73 F.
a8Glb TIL Edgar Allan Poe is credited with inventing the detective fiction genre with his character C. Auguste Dupin, who preceded Sherlock Holmes by 46 years. In Sherlock Holmes's first story, Watson directly compares Holmes to Dupin.
m1djv TIL German mental calculator Gert Mittring broke the world record for taking roots when he successfully calculated the 89247th root of a million-digit number.