› added 4 years ago

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TIL that GoBots, despite being thought of as a Transformers knock-off, actually pre-dated Transformers by a year.

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via reddit.com

WkAQ4 TIL in 1902 a man named Ludger Sylbaris survived a volcanic eruption that killed 30,000 people because he was drunk and arrested the night before. Held in a windowless cell he stopped the superheated shockwave from vaporizing the air inside by peeing on his clothes and stuffing them in the door slit
4knb6 TIL that despite generally being assumed to be and usually portrayed as an elderly woman, Miss Havisham from Great Expectations was only in her mid-30s at the beginning of the novel according to Charles Dickens' own notes.
lodBV TIL in admiralty law, pirates are "hostis humani generis" (Latin for "enemy of mankind"), because they are viewed as waging a private war against all nations in a space (the sea) where cooperation should be the rule
OMxe TIL that New Zealand once tried to weaponize tsunamis (Project Seal)
9Y5B7 TIL about Navy Seaman Charles Jackson French who, after his ship the USS Gregory was sunk in WWII, swam for 6-8 hours towing a raft of 15 survivors through shark-infested waters. He later received the Navy Cross.