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TIL The Roman Colosseum was sometimes flooded to re-enact sea battles

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ANZll TIL while struggling to sell stories as a writer, George RR Martin capitalized on the early 1970s chess craze (due to Bobby Fischer's win) and was a tournament director for the Continental Chess Association.
6EKXW TIL Jordan Solomon makes absolute BANGERS
BgLyr TIL a high school student wrote a text-based moon landing simulation in 1969 using a PDP-8 minicomputer. It was "a question and answer game" - at each stage of the landing you'd find out your current velocity and then you had to enter how much fuel to use. If you burned fuel too early, you'd crash.
e0xYk TIL that Readjuster Party, led by two former Confederate officers in post-Civil-War Virginia, abolished the poll tax, abolished the public whipping post, funded public schools for African Americans, hired African Americans as teachers, and founded the historically black Virginia State University.
grLX9 TIL in 1969, Hungarian gastrophysicist Nicholas Kurtis, with the newly available microwave oven, created a reverse baked Alaska consisting of a frozen meringue shell filled with hot liquor he called the "frozen Florida".