› added 7 years ago

82

TIL the last Boer war veteran died in 1993 aged 111 years old

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mxkwv TIL In 1995, the Blockbuster video rental chain had more than 4,500 stores. The company made $785 million in profits on $2.4 billion in revenues: a profit margin of over 30 percent. Much of this profit came from "late fees" on overdue rentals
BrQ5K TIL that Industrial Light & Magic created the visual effects for the 1988 film "Willow", which led to a breakthrough in digital morphing technology. The techniques developed for the sequence where one of the characters morphs into different animals, was later used for Terminator 2: Judgement day.
1NbO TIL I learned the popular phrase “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps” was originally created to highlight the impossibility of getting out of a bad situation on one’s own, regardless of how hard one works.
5VOKp TIL about Henry Cotton, an asylum director who believed that all insanity was caused by sepsis in other parts poisoning the brain, leading to widespread amputation of his patients' colons, teeth, reproductive organs, and even stomachs in order to "cure" them, with as many as 45% dying as a result
l7WWG TIL that there’s a species of jellyfish - Turritopsis dohrnii - that is theoretically immortal, as it can indefinitely revert back to its juvenile form through a process called transdifferentiation.