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150

TIL that to shoot the candlelight-only scenes in Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick used rare f/0.7 camera lenses manufactured by Carl Zeiss for NASA. Zeiss made only ten of the lenses; he sold three to Kubrick and six to NASA, who used them in the Apollo program to photograph the dark side of the moon.

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kJ8lg TIL More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.
KO5xQ TIL: The Byzantines themselves never stopped calling themselves Romans till the very fall of the empire. After the crowning of Charlemagne as emperor in 800, they were keen on viewing Byzantium as a Greek empire. But they s felt rather angry when they were called Greeks and not Roman.
MP7B TIL Over 20,000 Americans service members deserted during World War 2. Pvt Eddie Slovik was executed to serve an example to others, the only service member executed for desertion since the Civil War to this day.
gM9Y4 TIL: Thomas Jefferson helped popularize mac and cheese in America by serving it to his dinner guests during his Presidency. He even had his own recipe
x69xk TIL that despite over 30 witnesses to the 1955 murder of Lamar Smith, veteran and Civil Rights activist, in broad daylight outside the courthouse of Brookhaven, Mississippi, no witness - who included the local sheriff - would testify in the case, and so the crime went unpunished