› added 4 years ago

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TIL the concept of the Hogwart’s houses in the Harry Potter series, was difficult to communicate for translators of foreign editions since in some cultures there was no way of adequately describing the significance of belonging to house or being loyal to one.

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8oXX TIL that Edison once offered Tesla $50,000 to increase the efficiency of his prototypes. After months of work, when completed, Edison failed to pay and remarked “When you become American, you will appreciate an American joke.”
0wedN TIL that politician Boss Tweed was brought down by Thomas Nast's cartoons, which painted him as the embodiment of corruption. Tweed said to aides, “Let's stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers write about—my constituents can't read—but damn it, they can see pictures.”
OPlL TIL a man turned himself in to the police after his computer was infected with ransomware that displayed a fake FBI warning accusing him of possessing child pornography, because he actually had a hard drive full of child pornography and thought he had been caught.
7N7r TIL that Gloria Steinem talked Leonardo DiCaprio out of playing Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, saying, “Please, please don’t do this to those girls. The eyes of all 13-year-old girls are upon you and you can’t play a guy that tortures and kills women.” (Then she married Christian Bale’s dad.)
16pkr TIL the most deadly ship sinking in history killed almost 10,000 Nazis.