› added 7 years ago

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TIL the scientific adviser to the 2014 film Interstellar spent two weeks talking Christopher Nolan out of having a character travelling faster than the speed of light, as it defies the laws of physics

gMjn4 TIL multiboxing in gaming can be traced back to as far as April 1992, with the TinTin++, a MUD client made up of 700 lines of C code and which allowed playing and botting multiple characters. The Merc (MUD) developers discussed a programmatic way to detect multiboxing on Usenet in 1993.
0d1k5 TIL the nuclear bomb explosion in Terminator 2 was so accurate that the US nuclear team at Sandia Labs sent James Cameron a letter saying it was the "most correct visual representation of the effects of a nuclear weapon ever put on film".
LYZQ TIL shortly after returning from the moon and leaving NASA, Buzz Aldrin had a failed career as an Air Force test pilot, started drinking, had an affair, suffered depression, got divorced, got re-married, got divorced again, and became a Cadillac salesman where he failed to sell a car for 6 months.
neJAG TIL that in Germany, and some other countries, there's no punishment for escaping prison. Their law consider it's a basic human instinct to want to escape, so no extra time is added to the initial sentence if no other laws are broken in order to escape.
Ypr8r TIL researchers were able to predict whether or not a couple will stay together with extreme accuracy based on one partner’s reaction to things that excited the other. For example, if a wife says “look at that beautiful bird” and the husband blows it off, that’s a strong indication they’ll divorce.