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TIL that Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician and astronomer (276 BC), measured of Earth's circumference by using the shadow angles from the sun in two locations. He calculated it was 39,375 km, which is 1.4% less than the real number of 40,076 km

ADeYa TIL Saskatchewan was a hotbed of LSD research in the 1950s with a 50% success rate in treating alcoholism and and architect using LSD used the infamous hospitals to make future institutions more comfortable for the mentally ill.
LQrd9 TIL: King Edward VII commissioned a custom "chair" that let him "pleasure" multiple women simultaneously. Three were made, with one "original" and the two others being replicas, one of which is housed in a museum for sex devices.
QJApp TIL a Chinese woman was bitten by a Pit viper 3 months after stuffing the snake into a bottle of wine, in order to make a traditional Chinese medicine called Snake Wine. She opened the bottle to drink some after suffering from joint pain, the snake escaped, biting her in the process.
yQRma TIL about Sister Doris Engelhard of Mallersdorf Abbey, the last nun working in Europe as a brewmaster. The abbey brews about 80,000 gallons of beer a year, all of which is consumed locally. The beer is untreated and needs to be drunk while it is still fresh.
LkQrZ TIL Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church subscribed to a Calvinist doctrine known as "equal ultimacy," which holds that there is no free will and that God deliberately causes some people to be righteous and others to be wicked.