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TIL that Virginia Woolf was part Bengali.

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via reddit.com

EgW17 TIL Alexander the Great had a Hindu Guru who accompanied his army on their return to Persia. After he died via self immolation the army held a drinking contest in his honor, resulting in 42 people dying from alcohol poisoning, including the winner, who drank 13 litres of unmixed wine
rPv0 TIL NASA and the German Aerospace Center shoved a big ass telescope inside a 747 so it could work above the clouds.
6mKm TIL that the color purple is the royal color because the dye was so expensive to make: “dye-makers had to crack open the snail’s shell, extract a purple-producing mucus and expose it to sunlight for a precise amount of time. It took as many as 250,000 mollusks to yield just one ounce of usable dye”
R1m6 TIL Quicksand alone is considered harmless, and it’s impossible for humans or animals to actually drown in.
Oogda TIL about William "Billy" Lee who was George Washington's slave and personal valet. He fought alongside Washington through the entire American Revolutionary War and was the only one of Washington's slaves emancipated immediately upon his death.