› added 13 years ago

132

TIL Will Smith turned down playing Neo(The Matrix) to make the wild wild west.

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KOyV4 TIL that "decimation" means "removal of a tenth" in Latin, and refers to a Roman practice in which military commanders punished units for capital offenses by having soldiers execute 1 in 10 of their comrades.
laO5 TIL Thomas Midgley who invented Ethyl, the lead-based additive to gasoline, also invented chlorofluorocarbons, which just about destroyed the ozone layer. He got polio, invented a wire-and-pulley system to get himself out of bed, and then ended up being strangled by it.
W7VLd TIL It was thought that only 1 surviving parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence existed until in 2017 a second was discovered in Chichester, England, it is still unknown how it ended up there
Eg5NX TIL that 4.25 a.m. on 13th July 1944 a Junkers JU88 aircraft landed at RAF Woodbridge in England. The hapless German aircrew assumed they were near Berlin. The JU88 had a new radar system that could detect Lancaster bombers up to 100 miles away. Subsequent alteration of the bombers saved many lives.
M7AaW TIL there is a thunderstorm named Hector that appears every 6 months in the same exact spot.