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TIL President Grover Cleveland avoided the draft by paying a Polish immigrant to fight in his place during the Civil War.

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4Ly6 TIL A South African IT company preferred to use a pigeon to transport a 4GB flash drive over 80 km (50 mi) instead of using the country’s biggest ISP’s ADSL. Including downloading, it took two hours for the data to arrive, the same amount of time it took to tranfer 4% of the data over the ADSL.
BrkjD TIL of the Colt clan incest case - an Australian family discovered in 2012, engaged in four generations of incest beginning in the 1970s. The family grew to 40 members. The members' true identities remain unknown to the public.
grxP8 TIL When the 1930s musician Russ Columbo died from an accidental gunshot, his siblings went to great lengths to conceal the news from his mother, who had a heart condition. They wrote fake letters from him and used records to simulate his radio show. This continued until she died a decade later.
1adpX TIL Physicist Brian Schmidt made a bet with his colleague Sean Carroll, betting that we wouldn’t know the value of the cosmological density parameter within 20 years. Brian lost the bet by figuring it out himself, which earned him a Nobel prize.
kONWe TIL about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, where polish jews made a suicidal last stamd against the German army in opposition to being deported