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TIL that the same guy who painted “A Friend in Need” (aka “Dogs Playing Poker”) also invented the carnival cutouts (where you stick your face in for a picture).

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b9o0a TIL that a Stanford professor did the calculations for the famous scene in Silicon Valley where they figure out the fastest way to jerk off all the guys in the room, and later published a paper detailing the math behind it
Vmbm TIL the Soviets were trying to collect rock samples from the Moon with a probe at the exact same time the Appolo 11 mission was taking place in 1969. While Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were walking on the Moon, their probe malfunctioned and crashed into the surface miles away from them.
lWWr TIL that NASA wanted to send Caroll Spinney, the actor who plays Big Bird to space via the ill-fated Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986 to interest children in space. However, the Big Bird suit was too big for the shuttle, so he was replaced by teacher Christa McAuliffe.
VxKG TIL that during Vietnam, the US would play a soundtrack listed as the ‘Ghost tape’. It would play funeral songs and voices supposedly from the dead warning the soldiers to surrender or suffer the same fate.
5P8p TIL prior to 1868, eating meat from four legged animals had been prohibited in Japan for more than a thousand years.