› added 3 months ago

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TIL that Royal Navy nuclear submarines monitor BBC Radio 4 broadcasts, and if the signal is interrupted, it allegedly indicates the UK is under nuclear attack.

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via reddit.com

X0rRQ TIL after the 9/11 attacks, fires continued to burn in lower Manhattan for 99 days after. Eventually, the pile stabilized enough that construction crews could start using excavators and other heavy equipment. Ironworkers hung from tall cranes and cut the buildings down “like trees.”
jNPnj TIL Herbert Hoover was so fat that his doctor invented Hooverball, where "On a tennis-like court, two teams of three players throw a 6-pound medicine ball back and forth over an 8-foot net." Hoover lost 21 pounds in his term.
woEK6 TIL Air Traffic Controllers, who were fired and banned for life by Ronald Reagan for striking, actually endorsed Republican Party candidate Ronald Reagan during the election of 1980 through their union PATCO.
yVd1a TIL of the Iriadamant, a short lived community of mainly foreign people dressed in Native American outfits who lived in Northern Finland lead by a local professor who wanted to learn self sufficiency. After the experiment failed, it turned into a eco-cult whose members lived in extreme poverty.
W7G88 TIL Abraham Lincoln's voice was described as surprisingly pitchy (even falsetto like), shrill & nasally. Alongside George Washington's who was noted as high breathy, shaky and so low & quiet "as to call for close attention." Despite this, both were still noted as amazing orators from onlookers.