› added 1 year ago

49

TIL Before 9/11, the deadliest building collapse since the Civil War was the Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse, which killed 114 people and whose chief cause were rods only rated to handle 30% of the weight the walkway was designed for snapped and fell on a High School Reunion Tea Dance

0dWJj TIL that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger waited until his last day in office to announce the commutation of convicted killer Esteban Nuñez, the son of a powerful political ally, and then gave this explanation: “Of course you help a friend.”
G44Q TIL Ken Kesey (Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) volunteered for MKUltra experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs as a student, and inspired him to promote the drug outside of the experiments, which influenced the early development of hippie culture.
Jx0m TIL Leonhard Euler was the first mathematician to designate the function by writing it f(x).
b6Ox4 TIL in 2009, Benjamin Moody cracked the signing key to a TI-83+ calculator in 73 days on a 1.9 GHz dual-core processor, allowing users to flash their own OS. In 1999 same algorithm required a Cray supercomputer and 8000 MIPS-years of computing time to factorize a similar 512-bit key.
9wQM6 TIL researchers discovered a collection of species in a hydrothermal vent in the Arctic named Loki's Castle. These species, which they named Asgard, have microscopic sizes but share many features of eukaryotes (mammals, reptiles, etc.). It's now believed that we may have all evolved from Asgard.