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TIL: The Coconut Monk was a pacifist mystic who founded the Coconut Religion in Vietnam. He lived on an island, meditated in a palm tree for hours every day, had a cat and mouse as his companions, made shards of bombs into a gong, and went to prison for his opposition to the Vietnam War.

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OAE6 TIL that the creator of the Paddington Bear stuffed toy was Jeremy Clarkson’s mother
9YjmQ TIL that people of the Yanomami tribe do not generally address eachother by their names. It is considered an insult to call a man by his name by his public - in fact, the Yanomami verb "to name" is a synonym of "to insult".
0dRp1 TIL in 1999, financial analyst Harry Markopolos had informed the SEC that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Bernie Madoff claimed. It took four minutes to conclude that his numbers did not add up, and another minute to suspect they were fraudulent.
XEpJD TIL the Leningrad siege in WW2 has been classified as an genocide by some historians. American estimates the death toll was higher than combined american and British losses in the war, "The Siege of Leningrad killed more civilians than bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
RQE7 TIL that in the 1960’s, for fear of having their submarine communication cables cut by the Soviets, the US military sent 480,000,000 copper needles into space to secure their communications infrastructure. The needles acted as a mirror for radio waves, enabling communication between distant sites.