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TIL In 1942, the Japanese invaded the Aleutian island of Attu, capturing 42 Unangan (Aleut) residents and deporting them to a prison camp on Hokkaido. In 1943 the American forces retook the island in intense combat. Only 26 of the Unangan captives survived and none ever returned to Attu.

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rONw TIL A Japanese artist named Hananuma Masakichi created a wooden sculpture of himself so life-like, people couldn’t distinguish between the statue and the artist. He even included his own hair, nails, and teeth!
4XwAX TIL that Leo Fender was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992: a unique achievement given that he never learned to play the instruments that he made a career of making
wv0J TIL Schrodinger didn’t intend the cat thing to be taken seriously. It was meant to illustrate how absurd he found the existing view of quantum mechanics.
7JKP TIL that the idiom “the cat’s out of the bag” is derived from a practice by some merchants who sold piglets in bags. If the buyer was distracted, the merchant would quickly switch the piglet w/ a cat. The buyer wouldn’t realize until they got home and let the cat, and not a piglet, out of the bag.
x6k01 TIL that, during the Cold War, every infantry and armor battalion in the U.S Army had one officer trained to deploy the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), commonly known as the backpack nuke