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TIL Denton Cooley answered in the affirmative when a lawyer during a trial asked him if he considered himself to be the best heart surgeon in the world. “Don’t you think that’s being rather immodest?” the lawyer replied. "Perhaps,” Cooley responded. “But remember I’m under oath.”

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Bwpy TIL in an effort to deter nuclear warfare, Robert Fisher suggested the nuclear codes be placed in the chest cavity of a Presidential aid. The president would have to physically take a life in order to use nuclear weapons.
neYko TIL the USSR considered Darwinian evolution a lie created by "bourgeois capitalism", and instead opted for Lamarckian evolution for political reasons. The failure of Soviet biologists to acknowledge natural selection resulted in a series of crop failures and food shortages.
Z8X5Y TIL that Marcin Jakubowski, a Princeton fusion physics graduate, had a hard time finding a job out of college so he turned to farming. Upon purchasing his first tractor, he realized how inaccessible and expensive farming equipment was, so he created an open source tractor design.
neEAW TIL: Japan has one of the highest cremation rates in the world with the country reporting a cremation rate of 99.97%.
kORYe TIL in 1963 Robert Kearns invented the intermittent windshield wiper, presented it to Ford Motor Co. and was hired. Ford fired him and took his technology. He sued Ford for patent infringement and after 12 yrs. of litigation, at times without a lawyer, the court awarded Kearns 10.3 M dollars.