› added 11 years ago

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TIL that when you look at two parallel towers in reality, your mind autocompensates for your single perspective. When you look at two parallel images, however, it cannot help but do the same thing.

Kgoa TIL that Andrew Carnegie funded an organization whose goal it was to simplify spelling in the English language. Teddy Roosevelt began using the reformed spelling in his official communications and tried to get the federal government to follow suit, but Congress unanimously voted to stop him.
b9n94 TIL Alan Rickman and Alfonso Cuaron played a practical joke on Daniel Radcliffe while filming ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban’ where they placed a fart machine in his sleeping bag, positioned himself next to a girl he fancied, and set the farts off during a take that had taken ages to get.
R5l0j TIL that Pan Am were booking flights to the moon, between 1969 & 1971, they processed around 93,000 reservation tickets for free. They stopped taking reservations because of the admit costs but maintained well into the 1980's that the tickets would be honoured, if and when flights were possible.
VPBG TIL that Exercise Tiger, a US rehearsal for the D-Day landings in 1944, claimed the lives of at least 749 US soldiers, after a live-fire artillery salvo accidentally hit troops landing on the beaches, and subsequent attacks by German E-boats sank two US ships, and damaged a further 2.
9aj6 TIL that in 2009, Disney-owned Lucasfilm successfully sued Verizon Wireless over their line of Android phones named “DROID” as “droid” is a registered trademark of LucasFilm. Since the Steve Jobs Trust is one of Disney’s largest shareholders, Jobs’ estate makes money when a DROID is sold.