› added 7 years ago

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TIL of Jeremiah Hamilton, 19th Century New York's notorious African-American, Wall Street millionaire. Blacklisted by the city's insurance firms and Public Stock Exchange, he went on to amass a fortune of $250 million in today's money and was known as the biggest single rival to the Vanderbilts.

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epK7J TIL that beer changed statistics. W.S. Gosset was a scientist for Guinness Beer checking samples of ingredients against a standard. Adapting the normal distribution into a t-distribution allowed for fewer samples. He published it under the pseudonym “Student”, so was known as the Student's t-test.
a19o TIL That men receive a 63% longer prison sentence then women for the same crime.
gMnOX TIL despite Portuguese neutrality in WWII British ships were allowed to refuel in Portugal because of a treaty signed over 600 years ago - the Treaty of Windsor, which is the longest lasting alliance treaty in the world. The treaty has been invoked several times to save Portugal from invasion.
b9VM9 TIL according to Buddhism, at the core of all human beings and living creatures, there is no "eternal, essential and absolute something called a soul, self or atman". Nirvana, or liberation, is defined as the blissful state when a person realizes that he or she has "no self, no soul".
BXlL TIL in 2002, a 86 year old man was held 45min at the airport due to a strange metal item in his pocket that TSA couldn’t understand - it was a Medal of Honor.