› added 8 months ago

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TIL of a disgruntled designer for SimCopter (1996) that created an Easter Egg that would spawn "shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other" in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. But the RNG he created for it malfunctioned, leading them to appear frequently

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P1raV TIL the Marshallese used map charts made of sticks to navigate the Marshall Islands by canoe. They displayed the major ocean swell patterns and how the islands disrupted them. The charts are only interpretable by their makers who would memorize them before their voyages. They were used up until WW2.
neyno TIL the numbers (1-10) that we use every single day were actually made by Indians and spread by Arabs who found it very easy to use and adopted it into mathematics and is actually called Arabic numerals, because Europeans discovered it via the Arabs during the 6th century. Is this common knowledge?
ejy5 TIL that allowing food time to stand after Microwave cooking isnt just a suggestion but required after 18 people contracted Salmonella enterica in the US by skipping this step
pYABO TIL the first recorded ascent of Ben Nevis (the highest mountain in Scotland and the UK) was made by James Robertson, an Edinburgh botanist, in 1771.
L8v0 TIL of Vladimir Komarov. When the Soyouz Spacecraft catastrophically failed in orbit, he impossibly managed to manually pilot the craft to re-enter Earth’s orbit, only to perish because both the main AND backup parachutes failed. He died “cursing those who had put him inside a botched spaceship”.