› added 7 years ago

93

TIL that James Bond was named after an ornithologist whose field guides Ian Fleming, a prolific birdwatcher, read while on vacation.

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DQxxV TIL Switzerland has a merchant marine force. Switzerland is connected to the ocean via the Rhine and as of 2010 there are 37 ships flying the Swiss Flag.
VMRkD TIL: Having standard showtimes for films was not common until 1960. Previously most films would just play on a loop, and people could enter at any time. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho required that people watch from the beginning to the end and made showtimes more standard.
p8LKN TIL about Tennis for Two, a 1958 video game played on an oscilloscope invented by a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory for a public exhibition. Largely forgotten until patent litigation in the 1970s, it was the first video game developed purely for entertainment.
9YPDm TIL that the African elephant has the longest gestational period out of all mammals, with an average pregnancy lasting almost 2 years.
166jD TIL that Vince Gilligan almost didn’t go through with making Breaking Bad because he found out that Weeds was in development and had a similar premise. If he had known about Weeds earlier we wouldn’t have Breaking Bad.