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TIL the first recorded death sentence in the British North American colonies was carried out in 1608 on Captain George Kendall, who was executed by firing squad at Jamestown colony for spying for the Spanish government.

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b9AD7 TIL that the last person to be executed at the Tower of London was a German man named Josef Jakobs in 1941. He was a spy who was caught after parachuting into England. He was shot by a military firing squad.
0wjZj TIL The Soviets were the first to land a human made object on another planet- Venus- during the Venera missions, 1961-1984. In that environment the maximum survival time for one of the probes was just under 2 hrs.
R5e1l TIL a Puerto Rican customer claimed to have been poisoned when a snapper fish they bought and ate had a tongue eating louse inside it.The case, however, was dropped on the grounds that isopods are not poisonous to humans and some are even consumed as part of a regular diet.
QN0v6 TIL Morra (the number of fingers guessing game) was popular in Ancient Rome. The Roman's had a saying "he is a worthy man with whom you could play micatio in the dark" meant a man was honest. The game has since spread to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
yQjle TIL during the filming of Avatar, the lead visual effects company, Weta Digital, hired 900 people to work on the movie at one time. To render Avatar, Weta made use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage!