› added 10 years ago

2186

TIL - In an effort to solve the extremely high corruption rate problem, Georgia (the country) once fired it’s ENTIRE police force. It turned out that the police WERE the problem and the move actually worked, as the country’s corruption almost vanished in the following three months with no police.

Read more npr.org

via reddit.com

KO1rQ TIL Johnny Cash worked as a radio operator in the US Air Force and was the first person to learn of Stalin's death when he received and decoded the Morse code transmission being sent out globally from Moscow.
k8OW TIL Six weeks before JFK was murdered in Dallas, his Secret Service driver Tom Shipman died of a sudden heart attack in Camp David. This made room for William Greer. Greer didn’t accelerate the limousine after the first shot, instead he slowed the car down.
x6eOb TIL that Kurt Tank invented the most streamlined commercial plane (FMA IA 36 Cóndor) by placing the propulsion into the fuselage - yet it was never built due to obvious flaws regarding practicality (see comments)
W7N19 TIL that since 1953, a Italian regional bank called Credito Emiliano has accepted giant wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese as collateral for small-business loans. Besides holding the cheese as insurance, the bank stores and ages the wheels in climate-controlled vaults for the duration of the loan.
woJn8 TIL astronauts on board the ISS need to sleep near a ventilator fan. Warm air does not rise in space so astronauts in badly-ventilated sections end up surrounded by a bubble of carbon dioxide.