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TIL Americans consume 80% of the world’s pain pills.

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4k86X TIL Emerson Romero was a silent film actor who was deaf. When movies with sound were invented, deaf actors got less roles and the intertitle text was removed. This led him to make an early form of movie captioning in 1947 so that movies would still be accessible to deaf people.
b6laZ TIL that the popular 19th century "rain follows the plow" theory believed that agricultural activity could create a rainy climate. One variant of this theory led to widespread dynamiting of the air in the Great Plains in the 1870s to create rain clouds
7rArp TIL in 1974 a Norwegian student visited Lendbreen ice patch looking for historical artifacts. He discovered a spear from the Viking age. More than 1000 years old, it had been preserved in the ice and remains one of the best examples of these weapons know to date.
YpXXA TIL Pearl Jam discovered Ticketmaster was adding a service charge to all their concert tickets without informing the band. The band then created their own outdoor stadiums for the fans and testified against Ticketmaster to the United States Department of Justice
R5lmQ TIL: The U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA.