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TIL there was a 3-day Go championship game ongoing in Hiroshima when the city was nuked. The building was damaged and several spectators were injured, but play resumed normally after lunch break and concluded later that day.

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0d6Vj TIL when Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft had an asteroid named after him, he wrote a constitution for it's future inhabitants including articles that forbid use of imperial measurement units, outlaw the use of apostrophes, and limit the length of tax forms to one page.
ymp8 TIL when Australian driver Alan Jones won the 1977 Austrian Formula 1 Grand Prix, the race organisers didn’t have a copy of his national anthem to play at the podium ceremony (unaware that it was God Save The Queen). Instead, a drunk person played “Happy Birthday” on a trumpet.
L7xr TIL of Leslie Coffelt, who was killed defending Harry Truman from an assassination attempt. Shot by an assassin 4 times, Coffelt propped himself up against a guard booth and fired one shot, hitting the assassin in the head and killing him. Coffelt collapsed immediately and died four hours later.
1apRr TIL Joseph Merrick, more popularly known as the Elephant Man, had to sleep sitting up because of the extra weight his deformities put on his head. According to his autopsy, he died of a dislocated neck by trying to sleep lying down, in order to "be like other people."
0oGR TIL that Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi Longstocking, at one point paid a marginal tax rate of 102%. She nevertheless supported the Social Democratic Party responsible for the tax rate her whole life.