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TIL that Ringo Starr refused involvement with a documentary about the life of singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. This was odd considering the two had been very close friends. Starr said he turned it down because there are 3 people he finds it difficult to talk about: Lennon, Harrison, and Nilsson.

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oRkm8 TIL of Agongointo-Zoungoudo. Rediscovered in 1998 in Benin, West Africa - this town of approx 50 bunkers was built 32 feet below ground level in the late 16th Century. King Dakodonou is thought to have commissioned the town to protect his kingdom in the event of an attack.
70Vx TIL when Harry Houdini died, he willed all of his effects and props to his brother but stipulated that they be burned when his brother died. They never were and instead donated to a museum. In 1995, the museum caught fire and was destroyed but many props still survived.
o6aE TIL the highest troop concentration in the history of counter-insurgency warfare was not in Iraq, or Afghanistan, but in Ireland, where the British stationed 20 troops for every 1000 civilians during the peak of The Troubles
wrrM TIL of Louis Slotin, a scientist who died while working on the Manhattan Project. He accidentally dropped a hemisphere of beryllium on a plutonium core; witnesses saw glowing blue light and felt a heat wave. He died nine days later. The plutonium core was later nicknamed the “demon core”.
DQwWg TIL that a retired print technician from Yorkshire David Smith in 2023 discovered the Einstein tile, a single tile that is capable of tiling the plane aperiodically thereby solving a long standing open problem in mathematics.