› added 10 years ago

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TIL When astronomer Fritz Zwicky, father of dark matter, was banned from using the 200 inch Palomar telescope, he replied by calling them “a load of spherical bastards” because, he explained, they are bastards no matter which direction you look at them from.

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d8B8Z TIL President Theodore Roosevelt was such a loud snorer that during his hospital stays he had a whole floor to himself so the other patients could sleep
VMExZ TIL Joseph Pilates was a German working in England when WW1 broke out. While interned in a prison camp he developed a method of exercise prisoners could perform in confined space using just their own body weight. It worked well and was a hit, and he eventually moved to the US in 1926.
PBVE TIL Early movie theaters in Japan hired benshi, storytellers who sat next to the screen and narrated silent movies. They were descendants of kabuki jōruri, kōdan storytellers, and other forms of oral storytelling. With the advent of sound in the early 1930s, the benshi gradually disappeared.
0pDM TIL that the word ‘fortnight’ is just a contraction of 'fourteen nights’
R5x4a TIL Bill Murray hired an assistant who 'was profoundly deaf and spoke only in sign language' to make communication as difficult as possible between him, the director and the studio during the filming of 'Groundhog Day'