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TIL that to write the Beatles song "She's Leaving Home", Paul McCartney was inspired by a newspaper article about a missing girl named Melanie Coe. McCartney would later learn that he had met Coe before - he had chosen her as the winner of a competition on a game show he hosted three years prior.

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Lk5RZ TIL about Danish artist Thomas Dambo who creates giant wooden sculptures and hides them in the forests of Copenhagen
jRPj TIL: Within proximity of a nuclear detonation you are able see the bones in your hand while covering your eyes. In a similar fashion to an X-Ray picture of your hand.
VMO44 TIL In 1912, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo invented a chess-playing machine that could solve a king and rook vs king endgame. It didn't always deliver mate in the fewest number of moves, nor always within the 50-move rule limit but it would checkmate the opponent every time.
kOpnW Today I learned that you could use tally sticks in England until 1826.
neX5Y TIL of Märket, a tiny island divided by the finnish-swedish border. When the finns inadvertedly built a lighthouse on the wrong side of the border, the swedes agreed to trade it for an equal spot of land on the other side, causing the border to zig-zag.