› added 9 months ago

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Today I learned that once, while Elton John was visiting Groucho Marx, Marx playfully pretended to shoot John by pointing his fingers at him like a pistol, and John replied, "Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano player!" John later used this quote as the title of one of his albums.

vP447 TIL that so many people were killed in the Battle of Changping which lasted from 262-260 BC that the bones of the dead were used to make fertilizer in the 1970s
16Zw4 TIL about James Miller aka 'The Fan Man' who in 1993 paraglided into a boxing ring during a heavyweight title fight between Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe. He paraglided over an NFL playoff game, FA cup football match, and Buckingham Palace. He was then banned from re-entering the UK for life.
oBd8E TIL Of the pareto principle also known as the 80/20 rule. Which states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. ex. Microsoft has noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most-reported bugs, 80% of the related errors in a given system would be eliminated.
nWX8b TIL In 2010, to prove the Better Business Bureau was a pay-to-play scam, a group of business owners formed a fictional company called "Hamas" (like the militant group in Palestine). Hamas paid the BBB $425 and received a rating of A minus.
vlw7 TIL The reason Popeye eats spinach is because of an error in the calculation of its iron content by chemist Erich von Wolf in 1870. He misplaced a decimal point, recording iron as having 35mg of iron per 100g, instead of its true value of 3.5mg/100g. The former is equal to eating part of a paperclip