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TIL the Founding Fathers of the USA advocated for a monarch-like system for the newly formed nation right after defeating Britain in the American Revolutionary War.

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16ZYP TIL there is a Civil War Diorama museum in Gettysburg that depicts the battle scenes fought by cats.
Yp51P TIL When Alan Alda was seven years old he contracted polio. To combat the disease his parents administered a painful treatment regimen developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny consisting of applying hot woolen blankets to his limbs and stretching his muscles.
d5rE TIL The the power symbol found on every power switch is actually a 1 and 0. The English words On and Off were replaced by the universal numeral symbols 1 and 0 to bypass any possible language barriers as technology became more ubiquitous.
PeMe TIL that in 526 AD, there was a worldwide dust cloud that blocked out the sun for an entire year, resulting in widespread famine and disease. More than 80% of Scandinavia starved to death and 30% of Europe died in epidemics. No one knows the cause.
k7B4 TIL Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, was so keen on getting every detail right, he wrote programs to calculate the orbital paths of spaceships that appear in the book.