› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Thomas Jefferson was the most multilingual President of the US. In addition to English, he was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish. There is also evidence he studied Arabic, Gaelic and Welsh.

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aLX9 TIL there’s a probe orbiting Venus with a secondary mission: to find life on Earth. From Venus’s point of view, Earth is practically a pixel, which is exactly what exoplanets across the galaxy look like from Earth.
776p TIL that in 1978, Jefferson Starship had to cancel a German concert because Grace Slick was too drunk, causing the crowd to riot. They performed the next day, but she was so drunk that she groped female audience members and taunted the crowd for losing WWII. The following day, she quit the band.
4XyZg TIL that at Ford's Theatre a portrait of George Washington is hung on the box where President Abraham Lincoln was shot. At the time, there was no official presidential seal or symbol, so owner John T. Ford hung the portrait there, as a symbol of the office.
WkKL4 TIL Nigerian author Abi Daré originally wrote her first novel "The Girl With the Louding Voice" as a dissertation submission for her MA in Creative Writing. She submitted it for a competition, expecting that her use of non standard English would be an automatic rejection but she won
wDXo TIL that there is a species of ant that breeds none of it’s own workers, but instead steals eggs from other ant species, forcing them into slavery to work and feed their colony.