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TIL A man only survived the 1902 Mount Pelee eruption, which killed 30,000 people, because he’d been thrown in jail the day before and his cell was partially underground. It had thick stone walls, a bomb-proof magazine, and a small slit for breathing with no other windows.

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B8lb TIL Braille was originally created as a way for Napoleon’s spies to read documents without needing any light. It was Louis Braille that pointed out the flaws of the code which created the version we use today.
7Ljp TIL of the dramatic device “Chekhov’s Gun”. “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
Z8w0o TIL that Scar’s real name is Taka, which in Swahili translates to “garbage,” meaning that Mufassa's and Scar’s parents named them “King” and “garbage." Ouch.
yQ7QM TIL the Air Force recently invented underwear for fighter pilots that automatically detects urine and flushes it into a sack where it freezes the urine for disposal after the flight, solving a major problem of inflight peeing.
4g9N TIL that the most weight ever lost by a woman was 900 lbs (408kg). At her peak weight of 1,199 lbs (544kg), she became depressed and attempted suicide with painkillers, but they were simply absorbed by her fat, putting her to sleep for a couple days.