› added 8 years ago

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TIL The first man-made object to reach the stratosphere was a meter long shell fired from the Paris Gun, used by the Germans in WW1 to bombard Paris from 80 miles away. The curvature of the earth had to be considered when calculating where the shells would land.

Y7DEx TIL that the WR for deepest scuba dive (332.35 m set by Ahmed Gabr in 2014) is highly controversial and likely faked, as there are far too many discrepancies in the provided proof for the dive, some of which could easily have killed him had he actually dived to that depth
gMBDL TIL Although the custom is relatively recent, larvae are used frequently by several brands of mezcal to give flavor to the drink. A whole larva is deposited in the bottle, normally after having previously been cured in pure alcohol. Today, several brands are doing this including Patron.
xVM8g TIL the U.S. government saved every public tweet from 2006 through 2017 Starting in 2018, the Library of Congress decided to only keep tweets on “a very selective basis,” including elections and those dealing with something of national interest, like public policy.
VBXMZ TIL that in 2013 baseball great Mike Piazza appeared in a production of the Miami City Ballet whose school his daughter attended. Piazza said he did this in an attempt to raise the profile of ballet among sports fans.
PDO TIL that a plane crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing 20 people, because everyone onboard ran to one end of the plane and it became severely imbalanced. Why did they do this?-They were fleeing a crocodile! Also the croc survived the crash