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Today I learned that the price of admission for a zoo in 18th century England was a dog or a cat – they were fed to the lions.

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jN5v TIL a physicist wrote a mock paper full of made up gibberish written in the style of post-modernist philosophers and managed to get it published trying to prove that some philosophers are bullshitters
woEME TIL there is a garbage patch in the Atlantic ocean that is three times the size of France.
W6b4 TIL In the early 1970s, a schoolteacher England assigned a class science project in which his students were to find out the blood types of their parents to deduce their own blood types. Instead, 30 per cent of the students discovered their dads were not their biological fathers.
8elLa TIL that before Lincoln Center could reward David Geffen's $100 Million donation by renaming "Avery Fisher Hall" to "David Geffen Hall", they had to pay the heirs of Fisher - the original donor - $15 million. Geffen's donation has a provision that requires his name to be on the hall "in perpetuity".
e0VML TIL the man who campaigned to legalise the potato in France then promoted it by keeping potatoes under armed guard to give the impression they were valuable and instructing the guards to accept any and all bribes by civilians wanting to steal them