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TIL Ray Bradbury wrote a short story where a time traveling safari hunter accidentally crushes a butterfly under his boot in the Cretaceous period, thereby changing the course of history millions of years later. He wrote the story two decades before the term “Butterfly Effect” first came into use.

eDDL TIL the first ‘mooning’ in recorded history was 66 AD, where a Roman soldier mooned Jewish pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, causing a riot, an over-response by the Roman military, and the death of thousands
vPa58 TIL that the revolutionary idea by Julius Petri, creator of the Petri dish, was actually to cover the agar plate with a slightly bigger clear lid in order to see growth without contaminating the specimens.
PNyg TIL Samuel Coleridge perceived the entire course of Kubla Khan, a poem, in a dream, but was interrupted by a visitor from Porlock while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan was never completed. Thus “Person from Porlock” is an allusion to intruders who disrupt creativity.
grZG7 TIL the studio behind the movie Se7en proposed a sequel called "Ei8ht" where a suddenly psychic Morgan Freeman chases an also psychic serial killer. The idea was dropped after director David Fincher replied, "I would be less interested in that than I would in having cigarettes put out in my eyes."
mxgOp TIL about the Zambian Space Program of the 1960’s whose goal was going to Mars with a “Spacegirl”, two cats, and a Christian missionary.