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TIL the process of electing a Doge in the Venetian Republic began with an official going to a nearby plaza, grabbing the first boy he saw, and forcing them to choose ballots out of a box. The process subsequently lasted 10 more rounds of "torturous, ridiculous, and profound" election performance.

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jNVrn TIL that Roger Boisjoly was an engineer working at NASA in 1986 that predicted that the O-rings on the Challenger would fail and tried to abort the mission but nobody listened to him
e0PlE TIL there is a whale whose speech impediment prevents it from communicating with other whales, which got him dubbed "the world's lonliest whale".
lo7OA Yes, but no more than listening to Justin Bieber. The misconception that there's something unique about Mozart's ability to increase brainpower began in 1993, with a paper in Nature. Neurobiologists Gordon Shaw, Frances Rauscher and Katherine Ky of the University of California at Irvine found that students who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata demonstrated a temporary increase in spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by an IQ test.
eoLk TIL during World War II, the British secret service set up fake charities to distribute care packages with special copies of the board game Monopoly to prisoners of war in Germany. The game contained real compasses; metal files; French, German, and Italian money; and maps.
M7B4A TIL a Googolpex is a number so large that if you were able to write it out in books the total mass of the books required would be vastly greater than the mass of the observable universe