› added 13 years ago

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TIL in 1917 Germans built a 25-foot-tall armor-plated fake tree with a soldier sitting in it to spy on Allied forces. the Germans waited until nightfall and cut down one of the real trees to replace it with the fake one With artillery firing the whole time so the Brits wouldn’t hear the axes.

kOyGW TIL: In 1989, the football team of Mississippi segregationist private school Heritage Academy added the first black player in their football conference of “seg” academies. Two schools forfeited rather than play the school with a black reserve running back.
XExKP TIL that humans have approximately double the lifespan of our ape cousins because of a gene that we evolved to regulate the effects of our meat-rich diets.
PYv7g TIL that Gilles de Rais, known for being a former ally of Joan of Arc who was executed for occultism and murdering 600 children, may have been the victim of a plot by the Catholic Church and/or the French state. No corpses were found at his estate and the prosecutor used the trial to seize his land.
Qmkp TIL famed sci-fi author Isaac Asimov refused the invitation to renowned A.I. pioneer Marvin Minsky’s lab at MIT in the 1960s because he was “Writing about really intelligent robots of the future and was sure that if he came and saw the clumsy ones that we were making it would spoil his imagination.”
lv77 TIL Charles Manson took over 150 hours of Scientology courses, rejected it as too crazy, and then went on to murder a whole bunch of people.