› added 2 months ago

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TIL about Chang Dai-chien, one of China’s greatest 20th-century artists. A master who exhibited at the Louvre, kept a pet gibbon, and exchanged paintings with Picasso, he was also a genius forger whose indistinguishable fakes of earlier masters fooled the world’s top museums and earned him millions.

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neY9W TIL that a town in Colorado offers an open air funeral pyre as an option instead of cremation or regular burial
Y7eJZ TIL that there are still more than 81,000 American service members missing from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Gulf Wars/other conflicts
gMGP7 TIL Ethanol works as an antiknock agent just as well as tetraethyllead (TEL) when blended in fuel at 20-30%. General Motors decided to go with TEL instead of ethanol because it was patentable and thus profitable. Internal memos showed they knew of TEL alternatives but publicly denied them.
vPpXK TIL although Emily Dickinson was not widely recognized during her lifetime, she wrote nearly 1,800 poems. However, only 10 of these were published during her life, without attribution and sometimes without permission.
1XOO TIL the Director of the FBI keeps a copy of the Wiretap for MLK on his desk as a reminder of past mistakes.