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TIL Concerned about the number of cobras in Delhi, British colonial officials created a bounty, only to discover secret cobra farms created to collect the bounty. When the officials shut down the program the farms released their snakes, meaning they had far more cobras than before they started.

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mxgpy TIL a single worksheet on Microsoft Excel contains 16,384 rows and 1,048,576 columns, for a total of 17,179,869,184 cells.
DQdEg TIL that when Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon was criticized for wearing no. 88 (a code used by nazis), he claimed to not have known about the meaning and had only chosen it because no. 01 had been denied, which he'd wanted due to his admiration for the "Gerneral Lee" from Dukes of Hazard.
X07WQ TIL that The Great Gatsby was largely considered forgettable and a commercial failure when it was published in 1925. It was only after WWII, during which free copies of novels were sent to US soldiers overseas, that the book was re-examined and became a core part of American high school curriculums.
E1eX7 TIL Huy Fong Foods (maker of Sriracha) has never advertised its products and doesn't employ a single salesperson — all their success is based on word of mouth.
46LX TIL when executives first saw “A Charlie Brown Christmas” they said, “‘We’ll play it once and that will be all. Good try.” One of the animators stood up in the back of the room—he had had a couple of drinks—and he said, ‘It’s going to run for a hundred years,’ and then fell down.