› added 5 years ago

98

TIL that the name "Ivan the Terrible" reflects the older English usage of terrible as in "inspiring fear or terror; dangerous; or powerful" and not the more modern connotations in English where terrible means "defective" or "evil".

BrPKD TIL that, in 2014, OkCupid admitted experimenting on its users. Most notably, they ran experiments where they told people who were in fact bad matches that they were good matches, and vice versa. They found people talked more when OkCupid "matched" them and less likely when OkC "mismatched" them.
E6PX TIL L.A. mobster Johnny Stompanato dated 50s actress Lana Turner, once held Sean Connery at gunpoint on a movie set out of jealousy, was then disarmed and beaten by Connery, and later stabbed to death by Turner’s 14-year-old daughter.
NKBQ TIL that in response to South Park satirising Scientology, Scientologists put out a statement on behalf of Isaac Hayes (Who plays the character Chef and is a Scientologist) quitting the show, taking advantage of him being barely functional and unable to talk due to a stroke.
QNbEe TIL that, after having received spam from "predatory" academic journals fishing for publication fees, students from NYU and UCLA retaliated with a submission of their own. The paper, named "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List," contained text, diagrams, and graphs repeating the title for 10 pages.
jK1a TIL North Korean “researchers” have concluded that North Korea is the second happiest country behind China