Post * N7jKb — Curious Curator

› added 5 years ago

85

TIL the term "render farm" came about in part because Jamie Clay of Autodesk regularly wore farmer's clothes

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VV4Z TIL the first webcam was created to help people avoid pointless trips to the coffee room at the University of Cambridge. The camera provided a live 128×128 greyscale picture of the state of the coffee pot, which was located in the corridor just outside the so-called Trojan Room.

DQ10D TIL in 1714 the British government offered £20K (~£2m today) to solve the longitude problem - which had cost thousands of lives due to a lack of ship positioning. John Harrison, a carpenter, took 40 years to make the perfect clock - his final version only lost 39.2 seconds over a voyage 47 days.

oBrBE TIL one of the reasons the Chinese never fully developed gunpowder weaponry was because their walls could sustain artillery bombardments. Even 20th century artillery guns had trouble piercing their walls.

yQOBM TIL Yuri Gegarin, the first man in space, began life in a mud hut

wo0dE TIL that a species of fruit fly has sperm cells that are about 2.3 in (5.8 cm) long, which is over 20 times their body length. For comparison, human sperm cells are about 0.002 in (0.005 cm) long, making the fruit fly sperm cells more than 1,000 times longer than those of humans