› added 4 years ago

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TIL that the RMS Carpathia only heard the Titanic's distress call because Carpathia's wireless operator, Harold Cottam, was listening to his telegraph while getting into his pajamas, several minutes after his shift had ended. Had he signed off when he was supposed to, there may have been no rescue.

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4XV0b TIL Sofia Coppola wrote the lead of Lost in Translation, for Bill Murray. She didn't know him, spent a year trying to track him down, including asking random people who knew him through golf. Eventually she showed him the script, but he didn’t commit. She flew to Japan to film not sure if he’d show.
GYNkg TIL Teotihuacan was the largest city anywhere in the Western Hemisphere before the 1400s. It had thousands of residential compounds and scores of pyramid-temples, comparable to the largest pyramids of Egypt. It contains a massive central road and buildings but oddly, no military structures
wgB1 TIL J. R. R. Tolkien received from a fan a goblet with the Ring inscription on it in Black Speech. Because the Black Speech in general is an accursed language, and the Ring inscription in particular is a vile spell, Tolkien never drank out of it, and used it only as an ashtray.
7rElO TIL about Ernst Thälmann, leader of Germany’s radical left in the last years of the Weimar Republic, who thought the center left was a greater danger than the right.
MGkB TIL that New Zealand has over 70% power generation from renewable sources with a target to hit 90% by 2025