› added 8 years ago

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TIL Harold Williams a 20th Century Linguist and Journalist spoke 58 languages and learnt Serbian in two days. He amazed delegates at the League of Nations by speaking to each in their own language.

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oVXL TIL: Shin Dong-hyuk is the only man in recorded history to escape a North Korean concentration camp in the “total control zone” and live to tell of it. He works tirelessly to alert the world to the vicious human rights abuses in North Korea’s brewing holocaust.
lopAG TIL one of the singers of Africa by the band Toto was also the singing voice of adult Simba in The Lion King. And he is the son of composer John Williams
VMZa4 TIL: In 2004, a study was conducted to test the correlation between video game usage and surgical performance. It turned out that of the doctors sampled, the surgeons who played video games at least 3 hours a week performed surgeries 27% faster and with 37% less errors than their counterparts!
yVY0v TIL the British submarine HMS Poseidon sank in 1931 after a collision with a Chinese steamship; 21 crew died in the incident. In 1972, the sub was secretly salvaged by China which wasn't known about in the West until a journalist discovered its description in a 2002 Chinese magazine article.
0wpXy TIL Chinese internet users bypass internet censorship of offensive words by using homonyms based on memetic mythical creatures. Eg. 'Fa Ke You/ 法克鱿' meaning 'Fuck you', its direct transliteration into English. Literally, it is "French-Croatian Squid".