› added 3 months ago

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TIL that spelling bees are an English phenomenon. Languages like Italian and German usually don't have them because they have consistent spelling unlike English

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Zpmgv TIL about the “Dunny man” who would come late at night to empty the toilets in Australian out-houses. He’d hoist the filled drum up on his shoulder, carry it away and replace it with a new one.
MxD7 TIL That British soldiers executed Indian rebels by tying them to the mouth of a canon, then firing…
5Vrm8 TIL: President Franklin D. Roosevelt never invited Jesse Owens to the White House following his triumphs at the 1936 Olympics. In Germany, Owens had been allowed to stay in the same hotels as whites at a time when African Americans in many parts of the United States had to stay in segregated hotels.
K4g6 TIL when Seal Team Six was founded, there were only two other Seal teams. Richard Marcinko purportedly named the unit SEAL Team Six in order to confuse other nations, specifically the Soviet Union, into believing that the United States had at least three other SEAL teams that they were unaware of.
VMRND TIL Since female dairy cows are much more valuable than bulls we use machines to sort bull semen into male vs female semen. These machines work based on the fact that XX semen have more DNA than XY, and thus greater mass, and can be automatically discriminated when colored with florescence.