› added 7 years ago

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TIL that Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, was white

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QJ6Mp TIL that the '=' sign was designed in 1557 by Robert Recorde, having gotten fed up with writing 'is equal to'. He decided that there was nothing more equal than two parallel lines, and designed the symbol from that logic
xVXlg TIL that before the British royal family was the Royal House of Windsor, they were the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. They changed the name to sound more British during WWI after a German air raid killed a class of schoolchildren in London, whipping up extreme anti-German sentiment in the UK.
j6x5j TIL: TNT network has broadcast 12 consecutive runs of A Christmas Story over a 24-hour period every Christmas since 1997.
OoeDa TIL that “Ethiopia Skate”, a non-profit org., helped raise money to pay for skateboards for kids in Ethiopia and even created Ethiopia’s first skate park in 2016; it’s free of charge.
NXQM TIL that there is a company releasing genetically modified mosquitos with a “death gene” to breed with other mosquitos to decrease mosquito population