› added 9 months ago

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TIL that during the Cold War, the CIA experimented with using pigeons equipped with tiny cameras to conduct aerial surveillance. While it sounds like a joke, pigeons were genuinely deployed for spy missions!

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aPj9 TIL that there is a parody religion that instructs its followers to reject regular employment. Church heads also claim that their faux founder can time travel, which explains changes to religious doctrines from time to time.
Znvp TIL when congress asked physicist R.R. Wilson to justify the US government spending millions of dollars on a new particle accelerator (Fermilab), Wilson testified that the knowledge gained from it would have “nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.”
arG9 TIL GoldenEye 007 was developed by an inexperienced team; eight of its ten developers had never previously worked on video games
eaY4 TIL that Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is an allegory for the problem of child prostitution and the sex industry in Japan.
ZpRMB TIL According to the allied commander, the battle of Navarino, the decisive battle that prompted the great powers to recognise the independent greek state, began by accident. Diplomacy was still ongoing and the great powers deployed their fleets but with strict orders to not shoot unless shot at