› added 12 years ago

541

TIL whenever a pirate stopped a merchant ship, it was not uncommon for a handful of merchant crewmen to join the pirates.

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jKvQ TIL that the engineers of the Brooklyn Bridge, expecting to be supplied with sub-par materials, overbuilt the bridge to the point where even when supplied with inferior cabling the bridge remained stronger than it needed to be by a factor of five.
RODa TIL of Julie D'Aubigny, a 17th Century swordswoman and opera singer who frequently cross-dressed, killed a man in an illegal duel and rescued her lesbian lover from a convent by burning it down
PY0G TIL that the squiggly lines you sometimes see in your field of vision is actually the debris of a vein that used to be there when you were a fetus.
ZpKvp TIL in 1876, the government of Japan forced Korea to admit Japanese merchants and trading vessels into the Korean port city of Busan in a gradual attempt to force the Korean government to abandon its policy of isolationism
EgYL0 TIL that in 2015, a Columbian man's lung tumors were found to be the result of a tapeworm that had burrowed inside him developing cancer and spreading it to the man.