› added 11 years ago

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TIL The Catholic Church didn’t pardon Galileo until 1992 when Pope Johm Paul II admitted Galileo was right, 349 years after the condemnation.

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VMey0 TIL that humans have a 95% probability of going extinct (in 7,800,000 years) according to J. Richard Gott's evolutionary formulation
KOyxJ TIL about Augustus Agar, a Royal Navy officer with a wild 37 year career: he sunk a Soviet cruiser using a torpedo fired from a small boat, was knighted for spying, captained the Royal Yacht, smuggled £2 million in gold to Canada, and was pulled so deep by a sinking ship that he got the bends.
nW57b TIL only one person has ever lost the USA VP election and gone on to win the Presidential election: FDR, who won 4 times.
OoMK4 TIL that Chimney sweeps' carcinoma was a deadly cancer of the scrotum that affected chimney sweeps, as young as 8 years old; one treatment was to cut it off without anesthesia - and another was an arsenic paste.
ojL8 TIL that in 1971, on the day before Bangladesh officially won its Liberation War, Pakistani soldiers kidnapped the brightest Bengali intellectuals–writers, philosophers, historians, mathematicians, physicists, poets–and slaughtered them in the middle of the night.