› added 12 years ago

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TIL that the moon is actually exceptionally dark, and has a similar reflectivity to coal. It appears white in comparison to the darker sky around it.

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KOJ TIL that a female Allied spy parachuting into France in WWII greeted her Resistance contact with “don’t give me that French shit” and proceeded to kill a German sentry with her bare hands.
V5e8 TIL after the release of Gayla Peevey’s “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” (1953) a campaign was launched to give her a hippopotamus for Christmas. The campaign succeeded & she was presented with an actual hippopotamus, which she donated to the city zoo. The hippopotamus lived for nearly 50 years
wLe5E TIL that Aladdin animator Randy Cartwright described working on the Magic Carpet as challenging, since it is only a rectangular shape, that expresses itself through pantomime. Cartwright kept folding a piece of cloth while animating to see how to position the Carpet.
yrDw TIL in an act of industrial espionage, a Japanese scientist who stole an incomplete capacitor design led to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for companies like IBM, Dell, Apple, HP and Intel, in a decade long onslaught of faulty electronics known as The Capacitor Plague.
X0ZmQ TIL since ancient Latin lacked the letters J and U, Julius Caesar's name would have actually been either “GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR” or “GAIVS IVLIVS CAIVS.” The standard abbreviation was “C. IVLIVS CÆSAR,” reflecting the older spelling.