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TIL that Godzilla is covered in “keloid scars” to evoke the gruesome marks borne by the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. After these incidents, Godzilla was conceived in Japan as a metaphor for the danger nuclear weapons represent to humanity.

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wJwE TIL a US Navy POW blinked the word ‘torture’ in morse code during a forced TV interview in North Vietnam to signal his conditions to the Office of Naval Intelligence
EgY67 TIL that there was a "dancing plague" in 1518 that killed upwards of 400 people in Strasbourg.
6KkY TIL there was a county in Tennessee that, during the Civil War, decided not to join the Confederacy. Instead, Scott County seceded and formed the Free State of Scott. It didn’t officially rejoin Tennessee until 1986.
b9Bxa TIL Nazi spies tried infiltrating Russia in WW2 using fake passports; the passports were recognized as fraud because Russian passports use iron staples that stain the pages with rust, while Nazis used steel. During the Cold War, American spies made the same mistake
8aJpG TIL there is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language. What's considered a language is therefore subjective.