› added 4 years ago

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TIL South Africa is the first and only country in the world to build and then voluntarily dismantle their nuclear weapons

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Lk050 TIL of co-emperors Caracalla & Geta,who hated each other.At a meeting set by their mother, Caracalla had Geta killed.Caracalla then killed any who knew Greta.Over 20,000 were killed.It became a capital crime to even say "Greta".Years later he sacked a city because they held a satire of the murder.
awKNJ TIL World chess champion Magnus Carlsen once checkmated Bill Gates in nine moves. He lost to the 23-year-old in around 1 minute 20 seconds
XEemE TIL that Trent Reznor felt his song "A Warm Place" was too good to be his own work. After the song had been released, he was horrified to discover that he had indeed copied the melody from a piece by David Bowie called "Crystal Japan", written for a Japanese gin advert. Bowie found this hilarious.
7rPnM TIL the phrase 'Knock on Wood' derives from the pagan belief that malevolent spirits inhabited wood, and that if you expressed a hope for the future you should touch, or knock on, wood to prevent the spirits from hearing and presumably preventing your hopes from coming true.
OgVe TIL that the saying ‘to take with a grain of salt" comes from Pliny the Elder, who wrote about an antidote for a certain poison, having as one of its ingredients a measure of salt. He thought that if an antidote involved salt, then the poison itself should be regarded less seriously than normal.