› added 6 years ago

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TIL that John P. O'Neill, counter terror expert and head of FBI National Security Division who spent many years investigating Al Qaeda, retired in early August 2001 and started his new job later that same month - as Head of Security at the World Trade Center. He died there on September 11.

xVg1k TIL that everyone in Singapore above the age of 21 is automatically registered as an organ donor. Opting out from this Act will result in you being put at the very bottom of the organ priority list, should you need an organ transplantation.
5V9vD TIL In 2014, black taxi cab drivers brought parts of London to a standstill, protesting against Uber. This led to an 850% increase in downloads of Uber.
VM5QG TIL One reason the Lockheed F-117 and the HB1001 look like retro low-poly computer models is because they literally are. In 1974 when Denys Overholser leveraged 60s Soviet algorithms to calculate radar reflection, computers weren't powerful enough to reliably perform this function on curved surfaces
5VgL9 TIL A Diplodocus skeleton cast, nicknamed 'Dippy', donated to the Natural History Museum in 1905, is cleaned once every two years, and takes a team of staff two days to clean its 292 bones.
KZyB TIL The largest ransom ever paid to a single individual was to the Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, by the Inca Empire before their leader, Atahualpa, the victim, was executed in 1532. The ransom payment of a “roomful of gold” was probably over $2 billion in today’s economic markets.