› added 4 years ago

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TIL Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Enigma ending WWII at least two years early and saving ~11M lives, was a gay man. He was later arrested for being a homosexual and sentenced to chemical castration. Turing mysteriously died of cyanide poisoning.

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1aPXX TIL that since 1953, every King of Saudi Arabia has been a son of the first king, Abdulaziz. His oldest son was born in 1900 and the youngest in 1952. He has roughly 1,000 grandchildren.
E1knV TIL that Triscuit got its name in the early 1900s because it was one of the first foods to be baked with elecTRIcity
4e0R TIL that Su Hui, a fourth century Chinese poet, wrote a poem in the form of a twenty-nine by twenty-nine character grid. Each line can be read forward or backwards, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. This arrangement allows for 2,848 different readings.
N7dWb TIL in 2014 chlorine gas was released in a hotel hosting a furry convention, injuring 19 people. The apparent chemical attack is unsolved, and the source of the chlorine is still unknown.
W7XOL TIL about the "Green Card Lottery" the first commercial computer spam campaign (Via Usenet) which was started by the now disbarred layer Laurence Canter and his wife in 1994.