› added 6 years ago

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TIL I learned about the Pentagon's "Cafe Ground Zero." A hot dog stand in the middle of the pentagon that the Soviets believed housed the most top secret meeting room because satellite images showed U.S. military officers entering and exiting the hot dog stand at the same time every day.

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via reddit.com

WO7N TIL that with the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656, Christiaan Huygens increased the best accuracy of clocks from 15 minutes deviation a day to around 15 seconds a day.
87jG TIL As part of the War on Terror the song “Killing in the Name” was used by military interrogators at Guantánamo Bay as a form of psychological torture. “The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me,” noted Tom Morello.
QJ6Aa Today I Learned about Operation Legacy, a covert program by the British Foreign Office to destroy colonial documents in order to "avoid embarrassment". In 2011, victims of the British response to the Mau Mau Uprising helped unearth 20,000 of the surviving documents that were classified.
MoW0 TIL that Justin Bieber’s mom almost passed up the opportunity for him to record his first album because the agent that discovered him was Jewish. She said “God, I gave him to you. You could send me a Christian man, a Christian label! God, you don’t want this Jewish kid to be Justin’s man, do you?”
wkmo TIL Danish comedian Jacob Haugaard who promised more Nutella to army field rations, less sex in school staff rooms, more tail winds on bicycle lines etc. was elected to the Parliament of Denmark in 1994. During his mandate he often had the deciding vote in a hung parliament.