› added 10 years ago

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TIL that the majority of Darwin Award winners, nearly ninety percent, are male.

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Qdek TIL: When Catherine di Medici was queen of France, she kept a ‘Flying Squad’ of 80 women tasked with sleeping with powerful men to extract their secrets.
PY6QJ TIL Archduke Ferdinand survived an initial assassination attempt on the day he was killed when a grenade bounced off his convertible. He escaped unharmed, but later wanted to visit the wounded and that is when his car stalled next to one of the assassins, who happened to be nearby.
e0O4k TIL that the longest ever wedding veil was 6,962.6 m (22,843 ft 2.11 in)- that's approximately 293 tennis courts- and was laid down in rows on a field
awd0Z TIL about the Bangui magnetic anomaly which is a dip in the Earth's magnetic field in the Central African Republic - a grievously poor country in the middle of Africa. The anomaly may have been caused by an ancient meteorite impact...
b9kNa TIL that by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, France was conscripting men shorter than five feet (1.5 m) tall.