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TIL Saudi Arabia’s royal family’s net worth of $1.4 trillion, makes the family roughly 16 times as wealthy the British royal family, which has a net worth of $88 billion.

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l7jlB TIL: Town Criers also use other instruments than a bell such as a gong, hunting horn, lute, drums, etc and women were also town criers in medieval times. Today, there are still town crier World Championships for best dressed and loudest. The loudest crier hit 114.8 db.
8elbL TIL: the 1st mobile phone call was made by the inventor Martin Cooper on April 3, 1973 to troll his competitor at AT&T. His message? "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cellphone, a real, handheld, portable cellphone,"
VMjjk TIL that this painting is based on an actual collection owned by Cardinal Silvio Valentio Gonzaga (1690-1756). He commissioned Giovanni Paolo Panini to commemorate his prized possessions in this painting!
Zppa4 TIL Zeno of Citium, the founder of stoicism, wrote his own version of The Republic in response to Plato's. The work has not survived, but it depicted a stoic utopia based on the principles of asceticism.
BOXr TIL The US Army Special Forces have a training exercise where they have to liberate a fake country called “Pineland” in the style of a LARP. Since the exercise is based within an actual town, actual civilians are often called upon to preform roles such as shopkeepers or torturers.