› added 3 months ago

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TIL that Gambling on who the next pope will be is one of the very few things explicitly punishable by excommunication.

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x6yQ5 TIL there have been at least 68 cases of homicidal sleepwalking. A famous case from 1981 had a man unconsciously stab his wife 26 times. The court found him not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Because he was sane at the time of the trial, he was not sent to a psychiatric hospital.
m14ky TIL that there is an island off the coast of Long Island, New York that has been been privately owned by the same family for 400 years
yPNV TIL that gargoyles are used as waterspouts and grotesques are decorative.
l7M0V TIL there were about 4,500 lynchings in the USA from 1883-1941 - mostly blacks in the South, and whites outside of it. This averages to 78 killings per year throughout the entire country. The population of the United States was 50-130 million from 1880-1940.
yo68 TIL The man who wrote what is considered the first significant self help book in 1859, Samuel Smiles, is the great-great-grandfather of Bear Grylls.