› added 13 years ago

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TIL 25% of all trade between the U.S. and Canada goes over one bridge between Detroit and Ontario, and it is owned by a single man who is reaping the profits and funding a large advertising campaign in the U.S. to ensure he can keep his monopoly.

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D64Y TIL that after Germany discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer, the Nazis initiated a strong anti-tobacco movement. Hitler himself called tobacco “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor.”
dJJZ TIL that in 1856, an Indian mathematician was hired to calculate the height of Mount Everest and found it to be exactly 29,000 ft. Authorities released the height as 29,002 ft to avoid speculation that they had just given a rounded estimate as it would have been hard to believe the exact figure.
vALj TIL that NASA is performing experiments on a technology that they hope will lead to a real “warp drive” that will allow a spaceship to arrive at another star system in far less time than it would take to get there at the speed of light.
6OMQ TIL there was a point in the production of The Powerpuff Girls in which some people were late on their storyboards due to playing the newest Zelda game at the time. The studio was actually shut down for about a month so that they could get through the game before resuming production again.
LO4P TIL: There have been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar created it in 45BC. Without the extra day every 4 years, today would be July 28, 2013.