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TIL about the Viviers family, who moved from South Africa to Northern BC, Canada because of an extreme allergy to sunlight. Prince Rupert is one of the most reliably cloudy places on the planet, and the Viviers family won a Supreme Court decision to become permanent residents on medical grounds.

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Jmdv TIL London only reached its pre-WW2 population level in January, 2015.
KYL5B TIL the "crinkle crankle" single-layer brick walls frequently seen throughout England aren't just a wacky artistic design, rather they provide the same structural stability as a two-layer brick wall but without the extra bricks.
8Zd4 TIL New York Point lost out to Braille in the “War of the Dots” when Helen Keller considered it inferior to Braille. Her claim that it caused literacy problems among blind children was one of the chief arguments against New York Point and by 1916 Braille prevailed.
W7VVL TIL in 1969, Paul McCartney’s head went missing from a Los Angeles billboard promoting the Beatles album “Abbey Road”. The mystery remained unsolved until 2012, when a man named Robert Quinn confessed that he stole it as a prank on his 19th birthday and still has McCartney’s head in his living room.
ykbw TIL that in the 1924 Tour de France, riders used cocaine and chloroform as performance enhancing drugs.