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TIL The word faggot became used as a derogatory term in all-male boarding schools where younger students carried bundles of sticks for older students fireplaces.

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XEdxR TIL that JRR Tolkein fought in the Battle of the Somme
LYdZ TIL the most expensive Mega-Project ever was Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, costing 500 billion dollars, and dwarfing the cost of every other Mega-Project in history.
e0Kdb TIL the Cryptex, the cylindrical combination vaults that hold secret messages, made famous in The Da Vinci Code, is a neologism completely invented by Dan Brown and has no historical connection to a real device of the sort.
P77O TIL Xerox has a program called Social Service Leave that allows employees to take a year off to work for a nonprofit organization while earning their full salary and including job security.
9YLMp TIL the LAGEOS Satellite, in stable medium Earth orbit, contains a plaque (designed by Carl Sagan) of various binary numbers, a map of Earth's continents (1974), among other info. Intended to be message to future humanity, 8.4 million years from now, when the satellite re-enters Earth's atmosphere