› added 1 year ago

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TIL Lina Khan, the head of the FTC, was nominated for the position just 4 years after graduating law school

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DQ4eY TIL The mathematician William Playfair (noted for inventing the line, area, bar, and pie charts) was also a spy. The Scottish Playfair counterfeited and distributed false assignats which drove down their value and put France into an economic crisis by 1795.
neRkB TIL about the Guatemala syphilis experiments, US-run non-consensual experiments on vulnerable members of the Guatemalan population. The lead physician John Charles Cutler was also involved with the more well-known Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Rel4 TIL that the Pentagon has rocket balls a.k.a. kinetic fireball incendiaries made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves randomly at high speed, bouncing off walls, smashing through doors, turning an entire building into an inferno.
8aOaL TIL that flight recorders, commonly referred to as "black boxes", are actually orange!
LoB9 TIL, Australia has an owl so large it hunts and eats possums, called the Powerful Owl.