› added 9 years ago

148

TIL Ed Smith created a fake student called George Burdell when Georgia Tech sent him two enrolment forms by mistake. He signed Burdell up for all his classes and did all his work twice with minor changes so teachers wouldn’t catch him. The school awarded Burdell a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

0wBm1 TIL that in the DRC, there is a statue of former president Kabila that was built by North Korea. However, the statue's body and clothes don't really resemble Kabila's, and it is likely that North Korea just recycled a statue of Kim Jong-Il and put Kabila's head on it.
dDk17 TIL that Japan has the highest percentage of residents over the age of 65 at 28.2%. The world average is 10%.
9OOB TIL there was a fake French reality show in the style of the Milgram experiment, which made real and unwitting contestants shock someone on TV. 80% of them kept shocking the person (who was just an actor), even after he cried out for them to stop. 60% shocked him till he appeared to die.
VwJ8 TIL Paralyzed Writer Jean-Dominique Bauby developed a method of communication based around blinking just his one working eyelid. his final book, about 140 pages long, took Bauby an estimated 200,000 blinks to complete. The book ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ was a critically acclaimed hit.
wZVY TIL Helena Bonham Carter accidentally ruptured the eardrum of Matthew Lewis (playing Neville Longbottom) when she stuck her wand in his ear during HP and the Order of the Phoenix.