› added 10 years ago

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TIL that during his childhood, Fidel Castro sent Franklin Roosevelt a letter expressing his joy at Roosevelt’s re-election and asked that if he could, for the president to send back a ten dollar bill, because he had never seen one.

b9Ek0 TIL Mars only gets close enough to Earth to give up much detail just once every 780 days. It’s the only planet to reveal an appreciable amount of surface detail in a small telescope, and it also features occasional surprises such as dust storms and local fogs and cloud banks
ANOkw TIL Reggae star Peter Tosh was brutally murdered in 1987. Three men with guns came to his house demanding money, then tortured him for several hours. Some of Tosh's friends arrived and were also taken hostage. They eventually opened fire, killing Tosh and one of his friends, wounding several others.
5YZ9Q TIL that there is a star called "UY Scuti" with a diameter 1,700 times larger than that of the Sun's. It's so big that if placed at the center of our solar system its surface would reach past the the orbit of Jupiter and it would take a commercial airliner over 1,000 years to fly around it.
N1gJ TIL If our sun had a supernova it would be 9 times brighter to us than if an atomic bomb exploded against our eye
1awL7 TIL Stagehands mistakenly installed a malfunctioning piano for an hour-long solo Jazz performance. The musician, Keith Jarrett, had to improvise around the instrument’s limitations. A recording of this concert went on to become the best selling piano album of all time.