› added 11 years ago

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TIL that in 2011, two men para-glided from the summit of Mt. Everest, arriving at a village in 42min and avoiding the dangerous conventional 3 day descent.

e0QK5 TIL that in 1940, nearly 19 million people lived in the USA colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. That meant slightly more than one in eight of the people in the USA lived outside of the states. For perspective, only about one in 12 of the people in the USA was African American
dNOE TIL that before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no potatoes in Ireland, no coffee in Colombia, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no chili peppers in Thailand, no tomatoes in Italy, and no chocolate in Switzerland.
bomE TIL that C. S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia series) was an adamant atheist, until attending Oxford, when his closest friend, J. R. R. Tolkien (author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) convinced him to convert to Christianity.
Oo8R7 TIL Disney's 1992 film Aladdin was originally to be set in Baghdad but the studio was forced to change it due to the outbreak of the Gulf War. They scrambled the letters in Baghdad to create the fictional city of Agrabah.
b0G0 TIL that on September 11th, 2001, Officer John Perry of the NYPD went to headquarters to file retirement paperwork. When he heard the explosion at the world trade center he immediately responded and was later killed when one of the towers collapsed. He was the only off-duty officer killed on 9/11.