› added 13 years ago

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TIL that Diane van Deren, one of the world’s top ultra-runners, didn’t start running until a seizure crippled her ability to form new memories. She has the psychological advantage of never knowing how far she has left to run.

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v9NK TIL there is a thought experiment from Plutarch (AD 46 – AD 120) called The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s paradox, that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.
jN0ZN TIL that inflation was so low in the United States in the 2010s that economists were actually becoming concerned that it might signal economic stagnation and a lack of economic control. Inflation was lower between 2010 and 2019 than any decade since the 1930s.
Y7eXr TIL WW2 caused some 70-85 million deaths, from Germany’s invasion of Poland to Japan’s surrender (Sept 1, 1939-Sept 2, 1945). On average, that’s about: 12,000,000 lives yearly, 972,000 per month, 32,000 every day, 1,330 per hour & 22 each minute. So, a life every 3 seconds, constantly, for 6 years…
LYQ9 TIL about Tilly Smith who, at age 10, helped save her family and hundreds of tourists in Thailand from the 2004 tsunami by recognizing warning signs of a tsunami that she had learned in her geography class two weeks earlier.
rRxvW TIL about Sarah Forbes Bonetta. An admitted genius and royal of the Yoruba tribe's Oyo empire that was given to Queen Victoria in 1850 as a present after her parents were decapitated and her siblings sold in the Atlantic slave trade. She would be raised as the Queens Goddaughter.