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TIL that during the Irish Potato Famine, the poor were given construction jobs, so they could earn food rather than receive it as a handout. However, to avoid taking jobs from other workers, these people built useless projects, like roads in the middle of nowhere, and piers in the middle of bogs.

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64jZ TIL after X-raying a prayer book from the 13th century scientists discovered the pages had readable traces of an unknown work by Archimedes. The remarkable work book contained treatises on infinity written 2,000 years before anyone else thought up the concept.
pYvp TIL the Dead Kennedy’s started to attract an unwanted group neo-nazi punk fans in the late 70s. To combat the wave of unwanted fans, they released the single “Nazi Punks F*ck Off”.
N7xD8 TIL in 1975, Jack Hetherington, a physics professor at Michigan State University, wrote an entire paper on low–temperature physics and during proofreading realized that he had used “we” instead of “I” everywhere. Too lazy to change anything, he simply listed his Siamese cat Chester as his coauthor.
7rP5P TIL that the 2002 TV film It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie has the Twin Towers standing in an alternate reality where an angel shows Kermit the Frog what the world would be like had he never been born.
mxBLo TIL Robin Williams funded a scholarship at his alma mater, Juilliard, that saw a full-ride given to a student every two years. One of the people who won the award was future Oscar winner Jessica Chastain, who became the first person from her family to go to college