› added 7 years ago

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TIL the first person to circumnavigate the world was most likely Ferdinand Magellan’s slave Enrique of Malacca, who was born in Malaysia

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QNZn6 TIL about the "Law of Triviality" which states that individuals give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.
YyWd TIL that in the 2010 BP gulf oil spill BP and the US Coast Guard used a “chemical dispirsant” that they claimed broke up the oil. Instead it just sank the oil temporarily, made it 52x more toxic, did nothing to clean it up, and is extremely poisonous. BP knew all of this before using it
x6jVD TIL there’s a mineral named after Cummington, MA, USA, called “cummingtonite” which was discovered near Cummington in 1824
bPKN TIL Margaret Garner, a slave that escaped to Cincinatti, killed her own daughter with a butcher knife, wounded her other children, and tried to commit suicide rather when government officials tried to arrest her to return them to slavery
7x5b TIL: if officials awarded Lance Armstrong’s 2005 Tour De France title to the next fastest cyclist who has never been caught doping, they’d have to give it to the 23rd place finisher.