› added 6 years ago

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TIL that GSG 9, the elite German police unit, completed 1500 missions between 1972-2003, in which they only used their weapons five times

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AVx TIL a boy was conscripted into the Khmer Rouge at age 10 and layed thousands of landmines, but as an adult started clearing them with a stick and a Leatherman. His collection of defused bombs became the Cambodia Landmine Museum, which is also an orphanage for victims.
BZly TIL when Anders Celsius invented the temperature scale, he put 100 degrees as the point for freezing and 0 degrees as the point for boiling. Another scientist, Carl Linnaeus, waited until Celsius had died to change the scale to the way we read it today.
p80v4 TIL the phrase "mad as a hatter" originates from East England where hat-makers in the area suffered from dementia-induced insanity due to inhaling fumes from burning mercury as a part of the hat-making process.
rNG11 TIL that there are nearly 20 times as many billionaires today as in 1987. In 1987, there were just 140 billionaires in the world, worth a combined $295 billion. There are now 2,755 billionaires, worth a combined $13.1 trillion.
d8dlQ TIL Emilio Salgari, Italy's greatest adventure writer and the "Father of Spaghetti Western", never traveled outside Italy, all he knew about foreign cultures he learned from books and travel manuals.