› added 10 months ago

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TIL film composer John Williams is the most Oscar-nominated living person, with 54 nominations. He is also the first person to be nominated in seven consecutive decades.

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Ooxj1 TIL Kirkpatrick MacMillan, who invented the bicycle (disputed) also has the first recorded instance of a bicycle traffic offense, when he knocked over a pedestrian in Glasgow and was fined 5 shillings.
eyG5 TIL NASA management was so worried Apollo 10 astronauts would land on the moon against orders, they shorted them on fuel so they could only descend the lunar module to the panned 16km lunar altitude.
69EmX TIL of SC Tasmania 1900 Berlin. A German football club who, after the only other team in Berlin were kicked out the league got an unexpected promotion to the top league. The German FA wanted to keep a club in the city of Berlin for political reasons. They remain the worst team in Bundesliga history.
Ooyv6 TIL that Geoffrey Tandy, a marine biologist who specialised in cryptogams (algae, moss, etc.), was recruited to a secret British codebreaking organization during WWII because the Ministry of Defence confused “cryptogamist” with “cryptogramist.” Tandy ended up helping to crack the Enigma code anyway.
j5ka TIL that in 1942 Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a maximum income of $25,000, equivalent to roughly $350,000 today.