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TIL baseball was mentioned in a Jane Austen novel written about forty years before Albert Spalding claimed the game was invented in America.

Read more telegraph.co.uk

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neOad TIL in 2013 , 'Sweetie' the animated avatar of a 'fictional' 10 year filipina girl was used in a Webcam child-sex sting Operation to identify over a thousand pedophiles from all over the world
OkB1 TIL a monkey’s fist knot is used as the weight in heaving a line between ship and dock. Recognizing their potential, drunken sailors began using them as melee weapons in street and bar fights with the knot eventually being adopted by street gangs of the 19th century.
56LR TIL As a form of protest, Afghan women write landays—bawdy or sad poems with 22 syllables that often mock their sexist society.
gMmD9 TIL of the parasitic Massospora fungus which infects cicadas, replaces their genitals with a fungal stump, and hijacks their brains with amphetamines and/or psilocybin (the key chemical in hallucinogenic mushrooms), forcing them to mate non-stop and spread the fungal spores to infect other cicadas.
oRygo TIL about the Zebra Murders a string of racially motivated serial killings in California that killed up to 15 people.