Post * R7XJ9 — Curious Curator

› added 3 years ago

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TIL Billy Crystal and Robin Williams had an impromptu cameo on Friends. Crystal and Williams wandered in from a nearby set and improvised the opening scene for "The One With The Ultimate Fighting Champion".

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p8jVe TIL The longest pro baseball game ever was a AAA game that took 33 innings, took 8 1/2 hours to complete, had future Hall of Famers Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr. playing, set 12 records, and had the final inning resumed months later to much fanfare only to end after 18 minutes.

J1BMk TIL that no human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in over 15 years.

Oo8VL TIL of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, coined by Michael Crichton after discussions with Nobel-Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, which defines the idea that, "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong."

9PdD TIL after the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien wanted to publish a book on the history of Middle Earth, The Silmarillion, it was through a misunderstanding that the publisher rejected the draft without reading it, leading Tolkien to write another story about hobbits, which began The Lord of the Rings.

R78w4 When you look at sporting achievements over the last decades, it seems like humans have gotten faster, better and stronger in nearly every way. Yet as David Epstein points out in this delightfully counter-intuitive talk, we might want to lay off the self-congratulation. Many factors are at play in shattering athletic records, and the development of our natural talents is just one of them.