› added 5 years ago

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TIL a poor 19th century Chinese man failed the civil service exam, fell ill, reread a Christian pamphlet he had earlier ignored, & hallucinated that he was Jesus' brother. He led a cult/rebellion that conquered much of southern China, crowning himself as king. This civil war killed over 10 million.

RABl TIL “The Sopranos” was so accurate that on Monday morning when the FBI listened to their wiretaps the real mob would be discussing the show and thought they had somebody on the inside. They couldn’t believe how accurate the show was.
wLWp8 TIL that the classic movie portrayal of a crowded asteroid belt where the asteroids are only metres apart is inaccurate. In reality the average distance between asteroids is around 965,000 km (600,000 miles) and if you were to fly through it, a collision would be unlikely.
50VP TIL that, after Richard Feynman was named the world’s smartest man by Omni magazine, his mother said, “If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us.”.
PYg1L TIL Gandhi, the famously non-violent leader of the Indian independence movement, sent letters to Hitler pleading with him to avoid war noting that he himself "shunned the method of war not without considerable success"
ADxrl TIL that the 29th May (also this Friday) is officially “Put a Pillow on Your Fridge Day”: before refrigerators were invented in the 1920s, families in Europe and the USA would place a piece of cloth on their larder for good luck once a year.