› added 5 years ago

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TIL that in some public bathrooms, blue lights are installed in place of regular lights in an attempt to deter people wanting to inject drugs, because the blue lights make it harder to see your veins.

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via reddit.com

e0wd4 TIL James Watt needed to convince skeptics to ditch their draft horses&buy his steam engine. To prove its superiority, he measured a horse walking in ­circles to turn a grindstone in a mill. He multiplied distance it walked by its ­~180 pounds of pulling force&came up with a new measure: horsepower
7v8b TIL of the Bald Knobbers, a vigilante group from Missouri who killed and arrested members of the KKK and the Confederacy while wearing hooded horned masks at night
WknVX TIL about En Passant in chess where you can capture a pawn that has moved two squares from its starting square as if it had advanced only one square.
0OYy TIL that the flag of Saudi Arabia is never flown at half-mast as a sign of mourning, as lowering it is considered blasphemous.
4k8Zw TIL that between June 7–11, 1944, one in every five Canadian soldiers who were killed in action were murdered after surrendering, in a series of executions called the Normandy Massacres