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TIL Empress Catherine I of Russia was a peasant girl captured as a war prize then transferred around until becoming a concubine to Peter the Great. She quickly knew how to best please him, so he married her, and later Romanovs are her descendants. After Peter's death she reigned in her own name.

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9n8m TIL a drunk driver hit and killed a woman, but due to a paperwork error he was only cited for DUI (a misdemeanor). He pleaded guilty and was fined $350. After finding out about the victim, the court sought to try him for manslaughter. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 it would be unconstitutional to do so
Go0j TIL that Yogi Berra was ejected from a game after umps ruled that a ball hit by his player hit the concrete wall, which was in play, and not the plywood wall, which would be a home run. Yogi exclaimed, “Anyone who can’t hear the difference between wood and concrete must be blind.”
EgkBo TIL Thirty years before Newton published his Principia, Descartes published his Principia Philosophiæ which put forward a new mechanistic system of physics. However, Descartes’s system was entirely qualitative; he provided no equations of motion and his hypothesis has no validity
RDEQ TIL that an estimated 85 people die for every life saved by speed bumps, because while they slow down cars and save pedestrians they also slow down emergency vehicles that might otherwise save people.
dkw8 TIL that a 2010 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showed that laws banning ‘texting while driving’ have actually increased road accidents because people will do it anyways, and hide their phone down lower where it is harder to see the road.