› added 13 years ago

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TIL that almost all carrots used to be purple and it wasn’t until the 17th century that most of them became orange.

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R7VJa TIL The Alamo was fought over slavery. Texas settlers wanted to keep slaves after Vicente Guerrero, the black president of Mexico, fought for and abolished slavery. But Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston hatched a plan to take Texas from Mexico to create a slave state.
E1noo Planking for longer than 10 seconds is pointless, according to one professor.
D1P6D TIL of Ina Koenig, a German kindergarten teacher who jumped down a 75-foot mine shaft when one of her 3-year-old students accidentally fell down it. It was filled with cold water. For more than 2 hours, she kept the child’s head above the deluge, saving his life, until helped arrived.
4XJLo TIL that in the French city of Strasbourg, there is a 450 litre barrel of wine from 1472 that has only been tasted 3 times - in 1576, 1714, and 1944 (when Strasbourg was liberated from the Nazis)
Eymp TIL of the Peter’s Principle, a theory where companies promote people into management on account of performance rather than ability, resulting in incompetent managers and inefficiency.