› added 5 years ago

100

TIL President Harry S. Truman was not given a middle name, only the initial S. The S honors his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young. There is controversy over whether or not the period after the S should be included, although Truman's own letters suggest he regularly used a period.

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Gv5g TIL: When George Washington first ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses, he supplied 164 gallons of of alcohol to only 396 voters so they would like him. Washington won.
OR7L TIL of the mutation gynandromorphism. It is a mutation in which half an organism is male, and the other half is female. It is usually split vertically and is estimated to occur in 1 in 5000 birds.
ZpRjB TIL Victorians took photos of dead relatives—sometimes propping them up to look alive—for family albums. These "memento mori" photos were meant to honor and preserve their memory.
p8NGe TIL of the anthropic principle: the idea that any data we collect about the universe is filtered by the fact that, in order for it to be observable in the first place, it must be compatible with the conscious thinking life that observes it. We see, only because we are in a universe that can be seen.
nW4V9 TIL in 1940 Swedish cryptographer Arne Beurling deciphered the Nazi's T52, a machine more complex than Enigma. This way, the Swedes knew about Operation Barbarossa before it began. Since they wouldn't reveal how this knowledge was attained, their warning to the Soviets was not treated as credible