› added 4 years ago

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TIL about Leo Marks, WW2 cryptographer, who was given a 20 minute training exercise on his first day at work which took him the whole day to complete. He had accidentally not been given the cipher key and ended up breaking a code that was meant to be secure.

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7rJVM TIL of F.D.C Willard, known for being the first Cat to co-author a Physics paper.
e0YR6 TIL that while bulking up on raw salmon, grizzly bears often become infected by tapeworms and expel them before hibernation, causing them to walk around with very long “tapeworms tails” coming out of their butts.
xVvL0 TIL Francis Coppola was worried his film Apocalypse Now would be a box office flop and could bankrupt him, so he decided to quickly make a happy musical to recoup his losses. In the end Apocalypse Now was a success, but the happy musical (One From the Heart) was a disaster and bankrupted him anyway
L7eV TIL of Robert Johnson, a blues musician who played on street corners and died at 27 with little success. 23 years later, in 1961, his LP was reissued and became a huge influence on rock ‘n roll, including Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, who called him “the most important blues singer that ever lived.”
E10RX TIL the Ebola Virus should be called Yambuku fever, since that was the village in Zaire where it was identified in 1976 by Peter Piot, a Belgian scientist. Piot decided to name it after the river Ebola, 60 miles from Yambuku, to avoid stigmatizing the village by giving its name to a deadly disease.