› added 4 years ago

200

TIL: In 1841 during a naval battle between Argentina and Uruguay, the ship from Uruguay ran out of cannonballs. The captain ordered his men to shove the hard balls of cheese they had onboard into the cannons and to fire those. The cheese tore holes in the Argentine ship's sails and killed 2 sailors.

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a0GJ TIL Mohammed al Qahtani (20th hijacker of the 9/11 attacks) was interrogated at Guantanamo Bay by dripping water, physical torture, prolonged strip searches, and invasion of space by a female, none of which worked; it was continuously hearing Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” that finally broke him.
BrD0K TIL, during the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, organisers made a random girl to mime a song because the original singer was not allowed to appear because, according to the organisers, she was not photogenic enough.
OGM9a TIL that Ben S. Cauley, Jr. was the sole survivor of the plane crash that killed singer Otis Redding & 6 other people in 1967. Cauley took off his seat belt shortly before the crash. He managed to cling to a seat cushion for 20 minutes, until a rescue boat pulled him from the freezing lake waters.
4Va TIL Bruce Lee’s speed in terms of reacting + punching from a distance of three feet away was determined to be around five hundredths of a second (0.05 second)
Rmxl TIL that England, France, and Scotland all used to assess a ‘window tax’. Tax assessors would count the number of windows on a home or apartment and charge for every window on the assumption that the more windows you had, the bigger your home, and the more money you could afford to pay.