› added 12 years ago

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TIL Shirley Phelps-Roper (Westboro Baptist Church) is banned from entering the UK for “fostering extremism or hatred”.

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via reddit.com

rR571 TIL a German naturalist in the 1830's was arrested for heresy for claiming he could turn caterpillars into butterflies.
KYbgQ TIL the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch (who died of throat cancer in 2012) straight-up invented a sound never heard before: the reverse drum beat, played on Paul Revere (source in notes)
p8Qg4 TIL that pink Himalayan sea salt is actually mined from mountains in Pakistan from a sea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago
n6ab TIL that 100-year-old notebook found encased in Antarctic ice is part of Robert Scott’s expedition team
9RZX TIL that the British exclusively swam breaststroke in competition until the 19th century. In 1844, a Native American came to London and won a competition swimming front crawl (freestyle), a stroke never seen by the Western world, who then regarded it as “un-European”.