› added 4 years ago

501

TIL that Washington D.C. is not a state but a city and the capital of the United States of America due to Congress not having a permanent place to stay back in 1790 so they established a 100 square mile territory which would be marked as the District of Columbia.

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OWOg TIL that a portuguese soldier who ran out of bullets during the siege of Diu extracted his own teeth and armed his weapon with it, firing against the enemy that was considering he was out of ammunition.
em0b TIL Baghdad, considered to be currently among the least hospitable places to live on earth, was once the cultural and scholarship center of the world during the Islamic Golden Age.
VMKB8 TIL On a US Navy submarine using the "emergency blow activator, or 'chicken switch,'" is "a last resort in emergency situations." "Throwing the switch immediately blasts large volumes of compressed air into all of a submarine's ballast tanks, bringing the boat to the surface as quickly as possible."
g0MW TIL That the inverse of 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,998,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 gives the fibonacci sequence in 24 digit strings.
Wk4bN TIL that Pope John Paul II is considered to have begun the chain of events which saw the collapse of Communism in Europe, thanks to his trip to Poland in 1979.