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TIL that in July 2021, polling found that 58% of Western Cape voters were in favor of holding a referendum on secession from South Africa.

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GYWDg TIL that formed FBI director Louis Freeh once said, “Ask the American public if they want an FBI wiretap and they’ll say, ‘No’. If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone that helps the FBI find their missing child they’ll say, ‘Yes’.”
JLr4 TIL Every year the British Medical Journal publishes an issue full of joke science, like one paper that said men die before women because they are stupid. But years later these articles are cited by scientists as real, and this is causing a lot of problems.
D1AOj TIL George Lucas made Steven Spielberg a bet that Close Encounters of the Third Kind would be more successful than Star Wars and agreed to give each other 2.5% of their film's net points. By 2014, it was reported that this deal made Spielberg an estimated $40 million.
A4bl TIL that up until the 1600s, a “black swan” was a metaphor for something that did not exist. Then a group of Dutch explorers became the first Europeans to see black swans in Western Australia in 1697, and the phrase was amended to mean “a perceived impossibility that might later be disproven.”
4rdX TIL Martin Luther King Jr. engaged in extramarital affairs throughout his life. “[MLK] understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.”