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TIL that author Ian McEwan helped his son write his A level English exam about one of his own novels, Enduring Love. The teacher disagreed with his interpretation.

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8aXA4 TIL there are about 1,500 species of cicadas known. There are those that appear yearly in midsummer, and there are also the so-called "periodic" cicadas. They appear at prime number intervals - 7 years, 13 years and 17 years. Once every 221 years, the 13-year cycle and 17-year cycle cicadas overlap.
OoBPX TIL James Cameron had a nightmare about an invincible robot hitman sent from the future to kill him, giving him the idea for The Terminator.
16kEW TIL of "Man Walking Around a Corner", a precursor of film shot in August of 1887. The work is not a film, but a series of 16 photographs, each taken from one of the 16 lenses from Louis Le Prince's camera. A year later, he made the world's first moving image in October 1888, "Roundhay Garden Scene".
8a8yX TIL that one of the most famous lines in movie history, "You're going to need a bigger boat" from Jaws, was actually an ad-lib on set; furthermore, the audience screams at test screenings obscured the line, leading to a longer pause before hearing the line.
pYdAO TIL of Anton-Babinski syndrome, a form of blindness from damage to the brain—cortical blindness, where the patient firmly denies their loss of vision, as the disconnection between speech and visual pathways causes them to lose the concept of sight, filling in gaps with hallucinations—confabulations.