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TIL in 1999 the pizza chain Pizza Hut asked 50 U.S. governors to name their favourite books from childhood. The then-governor of Texas, Bush, named The Very Hungry Caterpillar, despite having been of college age at the time of its publication.

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Z8VGY TIL that following LeBron James' decision to leave Cleveland and join the Miami Heat, the sports memorabilia company Fathead lowered the price of wall graphics depicting James from $99.99 to $17.41: the birth year of infamous American traitor Benedict Arnold
GAw6E TIL that Edgar Allan Poe wrote his first detective stories after trying to debunk a famous chess-playing "robot" called The Mechanical Turk in 1836. Poe asserted that a mechanical chess player would play perfectly, but noticed that the Turk occasionally erred, and therefore suspected its creation.
l0d1 TIL that gamers, playing an online protein folding game, helped decipher the structure of an AIDS causing virus in 10 days; It had remained unsolved by scientists for 15 years. Using the same platform, gamers also helped redesign a widely used enzyme, increasing its activity by a factor of 18.
k5kB TIL 1992 an officer in the Soviet KGB defected to the west brining with him thousands of notes he took during his career in the KGB archives. These notes reveal the KGB’s hand in framing the US government for the Kennedy assassination, spreading the rumor that AIDs was a US invention, and much more.
pAG4 TIL Adidas was named after its founder Adolf “Adi” Dassler, who was also a member of the Nazi Party in Germany. His brother Rudolph founded the competing brand Puma.