June 2021 TILs

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This year, we've been keeping track of some of the surprising things that we have learned.

We call these "Today I Learned", or TILs. We have a private Slack channel set up to keep track of these, and occasionally we scrape the channel and collect the new TILs into a list.

Once you have a list, it makes it easy to review the things you've learned, and share it with other people!

Here are the "Today I Learned", or TILs, from June 2021.

June 27, 2021:

  • TIL "headship" is a word.

June 29, 2021:

  • TIL Superfund sites name a Potentially Responsible Party (PRP) who is held responsible (through legal and administrative actions) for cleaning up the site. (Link)

  • TIL that Operation Valuable/Fiend, an early CIA operation to overthrow the leftist government of Albania. It was sabotaged by Kim Philby, a Cambridge-educated double agent working as a Soviet mole inside MI6 (British Intelligence Service). (Link)

  • TIL about the Philby Tape. In a secret videotape from 1981, discovered by the BBC in the Stasi (East German Secret Police) archives in 2016, Philby describes his experience being recruited as a Soviet spy, his role in sabotaging various operations, and why he believes that his sabotage of Operation Valuable/Fiend prevented World War 3. (Link)

June 30, 2021:

  • TIL ginger, cardamom, and tumeric are all in the same plant family. (Link)

  • TIL the world produced 2.8 million tons of ginger in 2018. (I have no idea how to put that into perspective.) (Link)

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