› added 11 years ago

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TIL that the guy who offered the 100,000 Jews a safe haven in the Dominican republic was a bloodthirsty dictator

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69LEJ TIL In the early 1970s the submarine USS Halibut was sent on a secret mission to tap a Soviet undersea cable. The cable was quickly found because the Soviets left signs warning fishing vessels not to anchor near it. The operation was successful and the tap wouldn’t be discovered until 1981.
v157x TIL that the word "Karaoke" comes from Japan, meaning "empty orchestra" ("Kara Okestura")
J1QVQ TIL former US president Jimmy Carter and Motown Records founder Berry Gordy are related by way of their great-grandfather James Thomas Gordy.
5gBk TIL that fire extinguishers used to be color coded based on what was inside; today, each one has pictures on it that show what kinds of fires it can fight.
xNmk TIL a Toronto lawyer once fell to his death from a skyscraper when in an attempt to prove to some students that a glass window was ‘unbreakable’, he ran into it, only to have it pop out of its frame.