› added 10 years ago

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TIL the British successfully destroyed a Nazi drydock by ramming a ship filled with six tons of explosives into it, leaving the ship wedged in the gates until the timers detonated the explosives.

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PLGw TIL that in 1999, the CEO of Sun Microsystems responded to increasing concerns about computer privacy by saying “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
LQWnP TIL the word Snafu started off as a military acronym for the phrase Status Nominal: All Fouled Up. The military acronym started in the 1940s and was meant to highlight situational messes on missions. The term has since graduated to accepted slang.
M7mr0 TIL Roald Dahl published a short story called "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" about a machine that can automatically produce award-winning books. It ends with the author praying for the strength to "let our children starve" rather than sign over his work to be used in the machine.
jN4OQ TIL that 55 million years ago the North Pole had the climate of today's Miami
5ynn TIL on April Fools’ Day 1957 the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama, purportedly showed a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family “spaghetti tree”. Spaghetti was so little-known that many Britons contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own trees.