› added 6 years ago

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TIL of Howard Blackburn—a sailor who, after becoming stranded and losing his mittens in a small boat off the coast of Newfoundland, let his hands freeze in a hooked position so he could row back to shore. He lost all his fingers, but survived and went on to sail across the Atlantic single-handedly.

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p8Blb TIL Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts “can't stand snakes [and is] scared to death of the damn things”, but he still carried around a 100 pounds python and later on a king cobra with him because “there were enough zeros on [his] contract to make him forget about his fear [of snakes]”.
E1ZGd TIL the world’s oldest pool of water was found 2 miles down a Canadian mineshaft and dated at ~2 billion years old. By observing the sulphate in the water, researchers were also able to confirm that single-celled organisms had inhabited the pool at some point.
BgVxK TIL that 1,235 Canadian geese were rounded up and gassed to death after the famous incident of pilot Chesley Sullenberger ditching a passenger plane on the Hudson River with no fatalities, following a bird strike.
EoQw TIL environmental activist group Greenpeace once accidentally released a fact sheet which said “In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]”.
yVllX TIL about "The Golden Evening", a night in July 189 when an American magazine editor JM Stoddart had dinner with Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde and contracted stories from each. Doyle wrote "The Sign Of Four" and Wilde wrote "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" as a result. Both now classics.