› added 3 years ago

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TIL that the “SEGA” jingle at the beginning of Sonic the Hedgehog took up ~ 1/8th of the entire game’s storage size on the cartridge!

xDBD TIL Zildjian, the cymbal maker, is one of the oldest companies in the world. Founded in 1618, it’s just under 400 yo. Zildjian means “Bell Maker,” a name given to the Alchemist hired by the Ottoman Sultan to create noise-makers for war. The manufacturing process remains a family secret til this day.
4kK45 TIL We Might Have a Negative Leap Second. If UTC−UT1 (Figure 4) continues downward past −0.5 then we might need to have a minute with only 59 seconds for the first time ever. "We are almost as likely as not to experience a negative leap second in the next 12 years."
7rwjb TIL Spielberg began work on a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind called 'Night Skies' about a family living in a house being attacked by aliens which then split into both E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Poltergeist. In Gremlins, you'll see a theater marquee listing abandoned names for E.T.
NXv4J TIL Archimedes’ estimate for the number of grains of sand sufficient to fill the then known universe was 10^63 grains of sand
VB6pG TIL the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternity composed of veterans of the Union Army, Union Navy, and the Marines who served in the American Civil War, was dissolved in 1956 at the death of its last member, Civil War veteran Albert Woolson. At its peak, the organization had 410,000 members.