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TIL nonviolent resistance movements are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent ones, due in large part to their greater potential to elicit mass participation.

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165nX TIL that, when Cleopatra VII. Philpator (the one we know from Shakespeare/Asterix) was born in 69 b.c., her greek family, the Ptolemies, had already been ruling Egypt for 236 years since 305 b.c., and been there since the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 b.c. or his death in 323 b.c.
OoQ8Y In a new study in Science, a team of linguists at the University of Zurich uses biomechanics and linguistic evidence to make the case that the rise of agriculture thousands of years ago increased the odds that populations would start to use sounds such as f and v. The idea is that agriculture introduced a range of softer foods into human diets, which altered how humans' teeth and jaws wore down with age in ways that made these sounds slightly easier to produce.
p85y8 TIL that having more lifeboats on the Titanic would not have saved more lives. In fact, taking into account the amount of time they had to launch and the amount of crew there were, it’s actually incredible that they managed to launch as many as they did.
rWKw TIL in 1814, British soldiers invading Washington, DC arrived at the White House to find food, wine, and arrangements for a lavish dinner party Dolley Madison had prepared prior to fleeing the coming invasion. The soldiers sat and ate the meal and drank the wine. Then they burned down the house.
5Vd8k TIL fission nuclear reactors can form naturally in the Earth’s crust. In 1972, evidence of a 100kW, two-billion year old reactor was found in Oklo, Gabon.