Post * xOdb — Curious Curator

› added 9 years ago

93

TIL the Supreme Court ruled in 1898 there are only three exceptions to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment: Those born from foreign leaders or diplomats, on foreign public ships, and from hostile enemy forces occupying US territory.

Read more

d8Pmd TIL of an Australian circus family wrongly charged for sexually torturing children as young as three. Victims allegedly had to abuse each other, were cut with knives, had their tongues bitten and needles stuck in their eyes. One of the victims eventually admitted about "lying about the whole thing".

xVr60 TIL that a topless, laid-back statue of Abraham Lincoln stands at a federal court in Los Angeles; sculptor James Lee Hansen explained in 1941 that "from a sculpturing standpoint, it’s better to show the body without any clothes, [so] that’s why I left ’em off"

gMnLy TIL that in 1995, Dutch electronics engineer Jan Sloot claimed to have invented a data sharing system that could store a complete movie in eight kilobytes; he died one day before signing a deal, and despite months of searching, the system's compiler program has never been found.

8ayva TIL During WWII, the Amsterdam zoo hid around 250 people from the Nazis during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

QNjbM TIL in 2015, Thomson Reuters experienced a "reply all" email storm when an employee located in the Philippines accidentally sent an email requesting his phone to be re-activated to over 33,000 coworkers. Seven hours later, the original email resulted in nearly 23 million emails.