› added 11 months ago

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TIL about John Birges Sr., who decided to recuperate his heavy gambling losses by planting a bomb in Harvey’s Lake Tahoe Casino to extort $10 million in 1980. The FBI ultimately failed to defuse the bomb “unlike any we’d seen before” and it exploded 34 hours later.

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via reddit.com

R7QNa TIL On the floor of a cave in southern France were found a number of detailed portraits of humans dating back to the Ice Age.
4XwQX TIL pomeranians used to be much bigger, weighing about 40 lbs (18 kilos). Then Queen Victoria got a tiny one, which immediately became popular. By the time she died 12 years later, the size of the breed had decreased by half.
b6yj TIL that every year engineering students hang a VW bug from a bridge in Vancouver
ZpxZo TIL: There is one point on the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales where the temperatures in degrees are equal. This is -40 °C and -40 °F
698 TIL that in the 1960s a Russian doctor had to remove his own appendix after it burst because he was the only doctor stationed in a remote antarctic facility with no option for evacuation. He lived to tell the tale.