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TIL about Preserved Fish, a prominent NYC shipping merchant who sailed to the Pacific in his youth aboard a whaling vessel, became Captain Preserved Fish at 21 and amassed a fortune selling whale oil before his death in 1846.

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via reddit.com

7rAbb TIL that Julia Tuttle was the only woman to found a major American city, having owned and developed the land that would eventually become Miami.
wLBNM TIL That the chair has been around for nearly 5,000 years. The earliest example in the form of a sculpture from the Cycladic Islands at approximately 2,700 B.C. which was prior to Egyptian chairs, which were typically stools. Chairs with arms and backrests implied elite status.
lVQr TIL of ‘rat park’, a psychology experiment in which rats were offered drugs, and that proved that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, but connection.
4kXwg TIL the history behind the Official Flag of Los Angeles, “Fiesta Flag” representing 3 major Californian crops, and the two nations that ruled the area before it became part of the US.
mx1dE If it’s a particularly contagious virus, it would spread across the planet in a year. “If it starts in New York, it’s going to be in London certainly within a week,” says Ira Longini, a biostatistician at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who uses computer models to analyze how viruses globe-trot. “And from there, it will quickly travel to the rest of North America and Europe.” For Longini’s computer forecasts to become reality, though, certain conditions would need to be met.