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TIL Elizebeth Smith Friedman, America’s first female cryptanalyst, worked as a code breaker who successfully broke up a Nazi spy ring across South America during the 1940s. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her work until reports were declassified in 2008.

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LQKX9 TIL Alexander Grothendieck, considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, attempted to live on dandelion soup after his retirement to a village at the foot of the Pyrenees. Local villagers had to help him with a more varied diet.
grNBy TIL the reception to the original novel version of "The Spy Who Loved Me" was so bad that Ian Fleming epressly forbade the producers of the James Bond films from ever making a direct adaptation - only the title and the main henchman "Horror" who became Jaws remained.
8aMN4 TIL: The element Thorium has a half-life of 14 billion years, which is the age of the universe.
7Zpx TIL If you are a federally licensed gun dealer and your license is revoked because you’ve engaged in misconduct, your entire inventory is deemed your personal collection. You can then can sell it without doing any background checks on your customers.
epnlE TIL the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in April 1989 that would delay the end of PDT in presidential election years until after the election. Never signed into law, Pacific-New was inserted into many west coast Unix systems and they failed to make the conversion to PST on 1992 Oct 25.