› added 5 years ago

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TIL of nominative determinism, which is a hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. An example of this is Daniel Snowman, who wrote a book on polar exploration.

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b9E4j TIL the Atomium is a world famous monument in Belgium thats image was so tightly controlled, that until 2015 organizations posting photographs of it online were being threatened with legal action for simply publishing photos.
0wKPj TIL that Yuri Kondratyuk, Soviet pioneer of astronautics, while working in Siberia, built an enormous wooden grain elevator with a capacity of 13 000 tons without using any nails. Due to using such an unusual construction, he was arrested in suspicion of sabotage. The elevator stood till the 90s.
VBjd8 TIL that Marvin Hamlisch, who played the frustrated piano player in one of the final scenes of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, is one of the few musicians to receive an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards). He also won a Pulitzer Prize.
6EdJw TIL that the backup crew for Apollo 12 (who later crewed Apollo 15) played a joke on the main crew by inserting Playboy photos into their wrist mounted checklists worn on the surface of the moon. Nude photos went to the moon 14 years before the first US woman in space.
mnyp TIL that the brains of London cab drivers undergo large structural changes because of the massive amount of knowledge they must memorize.