› added 7 years ago

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TIL of Battle of Nations, an international, full-contact, historical medieval competition where people wear real armor and fight with real weapons every year in a castle in Europe

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epda5 TIL a Challenger space shuttle engineer, Allan McDonald, raised safety concerns against the wishes of his employer & NASA. He was ignored; a fatal accident resulted. When McDonald spoke out, he was demoted by his company. Congress stepped in to help him. He later taught ethical decision making.
4kLER TIL that Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” was a cover of a cover; it was first recorded in 1997 by Danish singer Lis Sørensen, then in 1994 by the original songwriters’ band Ednaswap (1994), followed by Trine Rein in 1996, before becoming a massive international hit in 1997 with Natalie’s version.
gkA9 TIL Russians buy baseball bats almost exclusively for violent purposes such as resolving traffic disputes, to the point car salons have begun selling bats, and 500,000 baseball bats were sold while only one baseball total was sold in all of Russia during 2014.
x7jw TIL a chimpanzee named Frodo has impregnated his own mother, killed a human infant, attacked cartoonist Gary Larson, and beat the head of primatologist Jane Goodall so badly, he almost broke her neck.
ndpB TIL: When an F18 is catapulted from its carrier, the pilot doesn’t actually take the controls. The acceleration is so brisk that the pilot would pitch down thinking that the nose was to high and crash into the ocean. They instead just hold handle they call the “towel rail”