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TIL about Havergal Brian who wrote the longest symphony in the world called The Gothic. It has only been performed 6 times since it was finished in 1927. It requires 200 musicians and 800 singers, including brass bands, a children’s choir, and a machine that makes thunder sounds.

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via reddit.com

L4Ym TIL a 13-year-old Canadian girl once ran the fastest marathon by a female, knocking more than four minutes off the previous world record. While running she was beaming and saying, “gee, this is great!“ Two minutes after the race, a doctor declared that her heart rate had already returned to normal.
MnQ8 TIL : The groove in a sword (the fuller) is not to let blood flow easier and ease the extraction of the blade. It is simply to lighten the blade in a way that won’t affect its strength.
x9Vb TIL that Pinball was removed from Windows because it had a rounding error in the 64 bit version of XP. The code was written by an outside company and it had no comments whatsoever, so they decided to scrap it instead of spending time trying to figure out how the code worked.
Zpmr4 TIL that Lee Greenwood, singer and songwriter of “God Bless the USA” (also known as “Proud to be an American”) also wrote a Canadian version called “God Bless You Canada” that is exactly the same tune, just slightly different lyrics.
kJByd TIL the Mediterranean Sea went into a cycle of partial or near complete drying-up from 5.96 to 5.33 million years ago, when the precursor of the Strait of Gibraltar closed off sealing the Sea off from the Atlantic Ocean. The period ended with a flood when the Atlantic reclaimed the basin.