› added 13 years ago

134

TIL that oral sex was illegal in 11 US states until 2003

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6EMxl TIL why you paid more for your hard disk in 2012: after Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco was hit by targeted malware W32.DistTrack.Shamoon, its owners sent out the company's private airplane fleet abroad to purchase every available hard drive, causing their global shortage and price increase.
lYn7 TIL Scopolamine (Devil’s Breath) is a crazy drug used in Colombia. When given to someone, they act completely normal, but have no free will. The drugged can easily be convinced to empty out their bank accounts and hand over all their possessions without remembering in the morning.
xYJb TIL that Eli Whitney’s cotton gin is short for “cotton engine”.
694vl TIL that with a GDP of ~$780 Billion, Manhattan would have the 22nd largest national GDP in the world if it were a country. Out of 213. That's bigger than Sweden.
NX8lE TIL Saddam Hussein once wrote a medieval romance novel called Zabibah and the King. It was a thinly disguised allegory which represented the events of the first Gulf War in 1991. It was a bestseller in Iraq and is said to have inspired the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy “The Dictator”