› added 4 years ago

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TIL that charity sky dives - on average - cost more money for the health service than they make. Each pound raised for charity cost the NHS £13.75 in return due to injuries picked up by people doing charity sky dives.

Read more pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

via reddit.com

707L TIL at a Marine Mammal Studies Institute, dolphins were trained to turn in trash that fell into the pools in exchange for fish. One dolphin was smart enough to hide pieces of paper under a rock, tearing off smaller pieces from the paper in order to get more fish out of it.
gMNbA TIL that in 2013 Detroit was so broke that they were unable to print out death certificates because they had not been able to pay the company that provided the special embossed paper on which they were printed, and subsequently ran out.
0O1 TIL the first MP3, created in 1987 by Karlheinz Brandenburg, was Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”. He chose it because the human voice is hardest to compress and believed Vega’s a capella was the perfect test.
XELjk TIL in 2005, the Vietnam War ballad "Fortunate Son" was used in a commercial for Wrangler Jeans, while the drug culture anthem "Lust For Life" was used by Royal Caribbean to promote their cruises.
16DPd TIL that fixing a software bug made the bug worse. While fixing a flaw in the Atari BASIC language that causes the computer to freeze, the programmer saw the same code elsewhere, and changed that too. Doing so reintroduced the same problem he had fixed, but now the lock up occurs much more often.