› added 5 years ago

68

TIL about Jose Castellanos Contreras, a Salvodoran army colonel and diplomat, who, while working as El Salvador's Consul General for Geneva during WWII, helped save up to 40,000 Jews and Central Europeans from the Nazis by secretly issuing thousands of "certificates of Salvadoran citizenship"

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

aVAL TIL that there is an ethnic group called the “asian pygmies” that are intentionally going extinct to prevent the passing of their many birth defects.
lokVr TIL that Jerri Blank's character in Strangers with Candy was based off of Florrie Fisher, a former addict and prostitute turned motivational speaker who was a cult icon for her outlandish stories shared with high school students in the 1960s and 70s.
GYOLj TIL Spike Milligan, member of comedy team The Goons, joked after fellow member Harry Secombe sang at Peter Sellers' funeral, "I hope you die before me because I don't want you singing at my funeral." 22 years later, at Milligan's memorial, Secombe's son played a recording of his late father singing.
eb7k TIL a scientist from Utah used his obituary to confess that not only had he never graduated from college or got a Ph.D, but that he never even learned what Ph.D stood for.
O9yY TIL that the London Underground has its own implementation of the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), where the platforms are actually uphill from the surrounding track, so that the Kinetic Energy is turned into Gravitational Potential Energy, and recovered when the train leaves the station.