› added 12 years ago

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TIL that bacteria called actinomycetes cause ‘the smell of rain.’

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via reddit.com

lorWa TIL about the Fast Inverse Square Root, an ingenious set of code that quickly calculated accurate square roots in Quake 3 using floating points and Newton's method. However, it is not exactly known who on the dev team implemented the code.
JY7Zj TIL that after the 2015 Paris Attacks, Northern Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers refused to cancel their upcoming Paris gig, citing their experience of musicians avoiding Belfast because of the Troubles in the 1970s as their reasoning
QJGvp TIL The Princess Bride had an alternate ending with Fred Savage looking out his window and see the four heroes on horseback. Andre the Giant was too heavy for a horse so they set up a cable system. That day of shooting Andre showed up drunk and workers had to lift a drunk giant on that horse.
YpjK7 TIL about Clementine Barnabet, an American teenager who murdered and beheaded 35 people with an ax due to her belief in a voodoo cult called the Church of Sacrifice. Sentenced to life in prison at age 18 in in 1912, she escaped in 1923 and was never heard of again.
epvEE TIL an American cyclist covered 4,707 km (2,925 mi) to create the 'world's largest GPS drawing by bicycle' in memory of her dog, Slinky. Kristy Bellmer started the 2-month journey on Slinky's birthday. Beginning & ending in Amsterdam, she went through Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany & Czechia.