› added 10 years ago

433

TIL that one of the first people to be killed by a robot was Kenji Urada, a Japanese engineer working at a Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant. While working on a broken robot, he failed to turn it off completely, resulting in the robot pushing him into a grinding machine with its hydraulic arm.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

woXRJ TIL about death flights. Captives would be loaded into a plane, stripped, and pushed out over the ocean. These account for 1500-2000 of the 20k-30k estimated to have been disappeared by the Argentine military between 1976 and 1983 in the Argentine Dirty War.
vPV07 TIL the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte was approved by Hitler to be the largest tank ever built, it would have weighed over 1000 tonnes and would have destroyed bridges due to it's weight alone
6BGX TIL that there is a court that “meets in secret, hears only the arguments of the government prior to deciding a case and its rulings cannot be appealed or even reviewed by the public” that is responsible for ruling when the government can spy on its citizens.
78VM7 TIL Chinese Qing Emperors had to rise at 4am for his first audience. They had rigid schedules to write comments on local government reports for hours a day, and their only permitted amusements were shows, calligraphy, and painting
9YaRp TIL in Ancient Egypt, cats were bred not as pets, but for ritual mummification. Puppy farms and other animal breeding programmes were a huge industry that provided a stock of animals to be killed and mummified as an offering to the gods and to keep the dead company