› added 4 months ago

18

TIL Portugal fought a 13-year Colonial War to keep its African colonies long after the rest of Europe had given up theirs. Eventually the military got sick of dying in a pointless war, overthrew the dictatorship and installed a democracy

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KOo09 TIL that, if we measure the height of moutain from the center of the Earth (which is the same for everybody) and not from sea-level (which is fluctuating and sometimes, hard to calculate), the highest peak on Earth is the Chimporazo Volcano in Chile.
jNKRp TIL that US nuclear power plants, by law, are built strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully-loaded commercial airliner without rupturing
W179 TIL that every paramedic in Iceland was trained in Pittsburgh
epp5D TIL that there was a brief mulberry tree bubble in the United States, in the hopes of producing silk domestically. Mulberry tree prices rose from $4 per 100 in 1834 to $30 per 100 in 1836, until blights and panic made the bubble burst by 1840.
9mAM TIL there are nearly as many single men in China as there are people on the entire continent of Australia.