› added 6 years ago

662

TIL the most successful and feared allied spy of WWII, Virginia Hall, was an American woman with a prosthetic leg. She escaped France on foot through the Pyrenees mts, re-entered before D Day, and organized havoc behind the Nazi lines.

Read more history.com

via reddit.com

oByGE TIL about a highly complex structure known simply as "E8"', a weird 8-dimensional mathematical object that for some, strange reason, appears to encode all of the particles and forces of our 3-dimensional universe.
a8BYo TIL about D.R. kaprekar, a great indian recreational mathematician who discovered kaprekar's constant and other magical numbers , but lived a humble life as government school teacher in a small town.
gr6M4 TIL Mao Zedong is is generally credited with eradicating both consumption and production of opium in China during the 1950s. Under his government, 10 million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops.
oVdA TIL that a popular 17th century Chinese concoction of pickled fish & spices called “kê-chiap” was picked up by the English explorers. The English settlers took it with them to the American colonies. This concoction became quite popular and we know it today as Ketchup.
vnJB TIL HMS Thetis has the rare and unwanted honor of a submarine to have twice sunk and killed her crew. She sank during trials in 1939, drowning 99 men, before being raised and renamed. Sunk again during battle in 1943, her entire second crew was also lost.