› added 8 years ago

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TIL Spielberg suggested Ron Howard (the director of Apollo 13) to use KC-135 - an airplane that could create 23 seconds of weightlessness for filming certain scenes. Those scenes were filmed in bursts of 25 seconds after flying 612 parabolas, adding up to a total of 3hrs 54mins of weightlessness.

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R5L17 TIL that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the creators of Breakout, the iconic arcade game from the 70s. They built it as a single player evolution of Pong.
X041E TIL that in 2000 it was estimated that between 230,000 to 284,000 iatrogenic deaths occurred annually in the USA.
wWRJ TIL that when Kiefer Sutherland found out about a “24” drinking game where you drink every time he says “damn it,” he decided to play along and started saying the phrase as many times as he could in an episode.
VLWQ TIL: Super Bowl referees also receive Super Bowl rings.
EX8d TIL U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas did not grow up speaking English. Instead, he spoke a creole language known as Gullah that began among coastal slave communities. Thomas has said the reason he rarely speaks publicly is because he does not want any traces of it to come out in his speech