› added 6 years ago

72

TIL of Bill Anders, who achieved a Masters in nuclear engineering, logged 8,000 hours of flight time as a US Navy pilot, became 1 of the first 3 astronauts to orbit the moon, and served as Ambassador to Norway all before age 45. He then went on to become one of the most succesful CEO's of his time.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

NXEQ8 TIL that because Paris is so romanticised in eastern cultures, travellers to the city - especially from Japan and China - can end up experiencing an intense culture shock that can cause anything between vomiting to actual hallucinations. The effect has its own name - Paris Syndrome
AD104 TIL The magic of Star Wars was largely thanks to one man, Roger Christian, who spent countless hours without getting paid, constructing the worlds on screen from piles of scrapped airplanes.
x69R1 TIL BBC developed a written form for West African Pidgin. Pidgin has 75 million speakers in West Africa but did not have a standard written form prior to this. E.g. ,"Wen be Eid al-Fitr and how dem dey decide di date?"
WBW9 TIL that Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Classification System, had “a persistent inability to control himself around women”. At Columbia “it was rumored that he asked for their bust sizes with their applications”; not true, but he did ask for photographs because “you cannot polish a pumpkin”.
9YPwm TIL In the 18th century many prominent voices were concerned by an 'epidemic' affecting young people whereby they were spending too much time reading books. It was diagnosed as 'a dangerous disease' called 'reading rage, reading fever, reading mania or reading lust.'