› added 6 years ago

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TIL Nurse Sandra Clarke was making her rounds when a frail patient made a simple request, "will you stay with me." When she returned from her rounds she discovered he died. Sandra became the founder of "No One Dies Alone," a volunteer program that provides dying patients someone to be with them.

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9Gy7 TIL in 1923, a Mississippi association developed an influential set of recommendations about street-sign shapes whose impact is still felt today. The recommendations were based on a simple, albeit not exactly intuitive, idea: the more sides a sign has, the higher the danger level it invokes.
O58a TIL Winston Churchill covered up the “Katyn Massacre” of 20,000 poles by the soviets to pursue the alliance, assuring them that “We shall certainly oppose vigorously any ‘investigation’ by the International Red Cross… Such investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by terrorism”.
m1xDv TIL about university constituencies, which allows universities to have seat at a legislative body. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and the Virginia Colony used to have these and Rwanda and Ireland still have them
ADlGo TIL that up until 1962, women were not allowed to attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner. At the urging of Helen Thomas, John F. Kennedy refused to attend until the ban was lifted. Helen Thomas was named president of the White house Correspondents' Association thirteen years later.
DQgAJ TIL that in the late 1800s, religious activist and U.S. Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock destroyed more than 30,000 pounds of books, and influenced Congress to ban the sale of "obscene" books. The resulting law was so broadly applied that some medical textbooks became illegal.