› added 10 years ago

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TIL that an African man won a court case in the 1650s that let him keep another African, John Castor, as his slave. That means that the first legally recognized owner of a permanent slave in America was an African man.

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J1mp1 TIL there are over 3.7 million ways to scramble a 2x2 Rubik’s cube
w7ZJ TIL one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming’s character James Bond was Dusan Popov, a double agent that handed J. Edgar Hoover the plans for the Pearl Harbor attack. Hoover however, didn’t trust the double agent and did not pass on the information.
rRMXw TIL a 1974 Portuguese military coup began with a "secret signal". The signal was a song being played during a televised music competition.
XZgD TIL Gandhi refused treatment of his dying wife with antibiotics that would have saved her on religious grounds and then took quinine 6 weeks later to stave off malaria
VMax4 TIL about James Thurber, author of 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' was cartoonist in New Yorker who got injured on one eye in childhood and lost vision from the other eye too. But he started seeing hallucinations and it is believed, they were the source of most of his illustrations.