› added 12 years ago

82

TIL while planning the invasion of Japan, the US ordered so many purple hearts that we still haven’t issued them all.

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ANNxa TIL: Kevin Bacon has been in a working band with his brother Michael since 1995.
d8Z5E TIL that modern computing can be traced back to fabric making on looms in the early 1800's. Punchcards were used to programmatically weave patterns. Named after their founder, Jacquard Loom cards helped inspire Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and early IBM computing.
E164x TIL that one controversial scene in Hitchcock's Psycho was when Marion flushed the money down the toilet because "no flushing toilet had appeared in mainstream film and television in the United States at that time".
Gkg1 TIL that Stephen Colbert is a huge J.R.R. Tolkien geek and has encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. Director Peter Jackson invited him to the set of the film and put him head to head with his Tolkien expert, and Stephen won.
pYE5e TIL that a lot of optimization algorithms are based on the observation of nature (ACO,PSO, genetic algorithms, honeybee algorithms, etc...)