› added 10 years ago

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TIL while not strictly legal, starting in the 1690s, British husbands used to sell their wives to end bad marriages. It was usually an auction announced by newspaper ad, to which the wife was led by a rope around her neck. Often the buyer was pre-arranged & the sale was a form of symbolic separation

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KOXo4 TIL that Homer Simpson correctly predicted the mass of the Higgs boson (the God particle) 14 years before it was discovered.
oRgGY TIL in 2012, India’s Patent Office issued a compulsory license overriding Bayer Pharma’s patent on the cancer drug Nexavar, allowing an Indian generics firm to locally manufacture and sell the drug for just $175/month instead of Bayer's $5,500/month, making the treatment much more accessible.
Bj8b TIL The rules of golf once provided that if your ball hit your opponent, he would lose the hole.
e0DNJ TIL Florida appears to have lots of interesting criminal stories because of the Government in the Sunshine Act, which forces everything the government does to be out in public. This includes arrest reports and criminal records.
Y7LoA TIL when Mattel sued dance-pop group Aqua for defamation over their 1997 hit "Barbie Girl," Court of Appeals judge Alex Kozinski dismissed the case. He concluded his ruling thus: "The parties are advised to chill."