› added 11 years ago

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TIL that in 2009 a Facebook campaign in the UK sent Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” to number 1 in order to keep the winner of Simon Cowell’s X-Factor from reaching the top

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via reddit.com

BryXW TIL when shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth timed his shot so that the noise would be masked by the audience’s laughter. Being an actor, he knew the play Lincoln was watching by heart. Lincoln was laughing when shot.
R5xM1 TIL of Koi Pla, a raw fish salad dish consumed in the Isan region of Thailand said to be responsible for the deaths of around 20,000 people every year. Mainly due to the fish being used containing fluke worms that if eaten can inflict you with bile duct cancer.
dDRWj TIL until the mid-1990s the Italian-American mafia controlled trash collection in New York City, fixing prices by extorting or murdering competitors or requiring them to join the price-fixing cartel. After an undercover operation convicted the leaders, trash collection costs dropped by $600 million.
9YB1Q TIL there are up to 7,000 different languages spoken around the world today. More than half of the world's languages have no written form. It is estimated that 75% of the world’s population does not speak English.
e0N6E TIL that email tracking is achieved by employing a tiny pixel image attached to your email that is invisible to you, but once you open the email, the image is loaded from a server and the server records that data for the tracking service.