› added 11 years ago

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TIL there’s an act called the “Read the Bills Act,” which requires U.S. Congress to read the legislation before they vote on it. It has been in limbo since 2006…

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AyLw TIL that the Chinese word for “contradiction” is 矛盾, consisting of the characters for “spear” and “shield” respectively. It’s derive from the book “Han Fei Zi” in which a Chu (楚国) merchant proclaimed to sell “spears that could pierce any shield” and “shields that could defend from all spear attacks”
e0Lpb TIL The British WW1 'Unknown Warrior' was given a state funeral with full military honours, entombed with a medieval crusader's sword, accompanied by a guard of 100 Victoria Cross recipients, as well as 100 women, each of whom had lost her husband and all her sons in the war.
QNPgk TIL the Unabomer, Ted Kaczynski, randomly chose his victims from library research.
JPm4 TIL Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the civil war general involved in the early Ku Klux Klan, had a total of 29 horses shot out from under him during the war. He himself was shot four times, and he defeated over 30 Union soldiers in hand-to-hand combat.
D1ynv TIL, The Blue Whale, largest animal on Earth which can grow to over 30 meters long, evolved from a land animal named Pakicetus that lived around 50 million years ago. Pakicetus was a four-footed mammal about the size of a wolf and it lived around what is now Pakistan.