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TIL San Francisco Zoo & Gardens was once the site of the world’s largest swimming pool - so large that lifeguards used wooden row boats to make their way across — and was also used by the military for drills and exercises

1aR1X TIL during the development of Space Harrier, the president of SEGA insisted that if the graphics were done, a game was ready for release. To properly finish the game, the lead designer rigged a secret switch to the bottom of his desk that would mess up the colors whenever giving a demonstration.
kgdB TIL slugs love beer. LPT for gardeners - Place shallow dishes of beer around your garden in areas that slugs tend to frequent. Slugs are attracted to the beer but they cannot get out again and drown.
X0B8P TIL Taoist myths say Lao Tzu was a virgin birth. By the mid-twentieth century, consensus had emerged among Western scholars that the historicity of such a person is doubtful and that the Tao Te Ching is a compilation of Taoist sayings by many hands, with an author being invented afterwards.
l7JrN TIL that in 2004 Alicia Esteve Head, under the alias Tania Head, pretended to be a 9/11 survivor, created an online support group and ultimately was named President of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network before being discovered as a fraud in 2007 by The New York Times.
ZRBQ TIL that dolphins are not uniquely intelligent; chickens perform similarly on the same intelligence tests used to push for legislation to designate dolphins “non-human persons”, & the evidence that dolphins are capable of complex emotions, such as empathy, have been inconclusive.