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TIL legendary actor James Earl Jones, the voice behind Darth Vader and Mufasa, refused to speak as a child because of a severe stutter. He overcame this by performing poetry readings on the advice of his high school teacher, which ultimately set him on the course of acting.

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W7eD4 TIL The Traitorous Eight left the employment of Nobel Prize Winner William Shockley due to his mismanagement and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Companies such as AMD and Intel are know as the Fairchildren
nlrb TIL: A 2700 year old bag of weed was found in a grave.
e7eb TIL that in 1998 the NIH changed lowered the BMI scores that would be normal, overweight, or obese. 29 million Americans became overweight over night, even though there was no clinical reason. However 7 out of 9 people on the committee worked for or owned weight loss companies.
wj57 TIL that there is still one US soldier that is being held captive by insurgents in Afghanistan and has been so since 2009. Release efforts to free him have currently stalled.
VMZbk TIL the perfect Japanese pangram (a sentence using every letter of an alphabet once) is not a nonsensical phrase like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" - It's actually a poem called the Iroha, which is considered so perfect it has provided the ordering of Japanese syllabary since 1079.