› added 10 months ago

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TIL two of the tallest people alive in 1871 married, martin van buren bates, and Anna Haining (the prior measuring 7 foot 9 inches, weighing 475 pounds, the latter being 7 foot 11, 212 pounds) and had two still born children, both being far more giant than babies even on the larger end of the scale

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oB6nE TIL Hyenas are genetically closer to cats than dogs
rNL60 TIL English has 14-21 vowel sounds (depending on dialect), far more than the 5-6 of an average language like Spanish, Hindi, Telugu, Arabic, or Mandarin. This is why foreign speakers often struggle with getting English vowels right.
b9Yv0 TIL that Stephen Wiltshire, autistic savant who draws detailed landscapes from memory and was featured in a BBC documentary as a child, now has his own gallery in London. A 76m panoramic memory drawing of New York is on display at JFK Airport. He was appointed an MBE in 2006.
do8d TIL Emily Dickinson instructed her sister to burn all her letters after her death. Her sister obeyed but discovered 40 notebooks that she received no instruction on. Inside were the poems that gained Dickinson’s posthumous fame today.
4vBo TIL in 1968 Kim Il Sung sent 31 commandos to South Korea to try and assassinate the president. After they infiltrated the border they stumbled on two brothers chopping firewood. They decided to indoctrinate them about the benefits of communism and release them. The brothers notified the police