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TIL Blaine, Washington's slogan is “Where America Begins” because of its northwest location on the US-Canadian border. Blaine once had the world’s largest salmon cannery located on a spit and it is now a resort complex

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gMkg9 TIL the Antikythera Shipwreck of the First Century BCE, discovered by Greek sponge divers, yielded artifacts including art, jewelry, a statue of Herakles, coins, but most importantly the Antikythera Mechanism, interlocking gears that computed the movements of the sun, the moon, and eclipse dates
gZL8 TIL: in 1955, someone dropped a >600 year old plaster buddha statue… to discover the plaster was actually covering a solid gold statue.
l9OG TIL that in 1889 a dam owned by an exclusive hunting and fishing club gave way, causing a flood that killed 2,209 people in southern Pennsylvania. The club’s members included many of the richest men in America and efforts to hold it legally responsible went nowhere
narr TIL one mathematician, inspired by Helen of Troy, proposed a standard unit of measurement for beauty called the “millihelen.” The millihelen is jokingly used as the measuring unit how much beauty is required to launch a ship.
xvv1 TIL according to Norse mythology, the wolf Fernir was so powerful that dwarves created a special binding made of the roots of a mountain, the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, and the breath of a fish to tie him down…this is why these things no longer exist in the world