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TIL that Thomas Peterffy was told by NASDAQ that his algorithmic trading was illegal because it lacked a keyboard so he created a robot with fingers to type all trades on the keyboard which made it legal - “the robot typed so fast it sounded like a machine gun.”

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via reddit.com

aEWb TIL when the incident at Chernobyl took place, three men sacrificed themselves by diving into the contaminated waters and draining the valve from the reactor which contained radioactive materials. Had the valve not been drained, it would have most likely spread across most parts of Europe.
Brkok TIL about The floating turd mystery that still haunts NASA. During Apollo 10 — in which a crewed spacecraft orbited the moon as a dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing — astronauts encountered a deep mystery. One of them had left a "turd floating in the air".
OOma TIL during a training exercise in 1940, 2 Australian air force planes collided & locked together 1000ft in the air, yet pilot L. Fuller landed the entangled planes after all other trainees ejected. Fuller, aged 21, was commemorated, but died 4yrs later when his bicycle collided with a passenger bus.
nWyyP TIL that Michael Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” (1990), was a workaholic who followed what he called "a structured approach" of ritualistic self-denial, where, while writing a book, he’d rise increasingly early each day. At one point, Crichton would go to bed at 10 PM and wake up at 2 AM.
EVlw TIL Norway gets 98-99% of its electricity from hydroelectric power, more than any other country