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TIL I learned that in England, there are "wavy" brick fences. This shape uses fewer bricks than a straight wall. The waves' arch support allows the wavy wall to stand strong while a straight wall requires at least two layers of bricks to do the same.

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0wGeR TIL in 1917, 1,300 miners went on strike in Bisbee, AZ over unsafe working conditions, low pay, and long hours. The mining company hired 2,000 men and loaded the strikers at gunpoint into cattle cars for a 16 hour trip through the desert without food or water and left them in New Mexico.
RdoQ TIL that when traffic cameras were first set up in California, a man got a speeding ticket in the mail that included his photo as proof of guilt. Mad that he was fined by a camera, the man took a picture of money and mailed it off. Weeks later he was mailed another photo… this time of handcuffs.
wpv8 TIL one of the first books burned by Nazis, Heinrich Heine play, contained a famous line “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people”
D1W5Y TIL: The light atop a Hollywood record company building has been quietly blinking-out messages in Morse code since first being turned-on in 1956 --by Morse's own granddaughter. (The default message is one word, but it once revealed an album release date: “Katy Perry. Prism. October 22, 2013.")
4kpyg TIL Until 1980, users of chess computers had to move the computer’s pieces by hand. The 1982 Novag Robot Adversary used a robotic arm to move pieces but only 2500 units were produced due to high failure rates