› added 7 years ago

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TIL that a woman’s professional and personal life were ruined with a single tweet that said: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The woman, Justine Sacco, turned out to be a P.R. Chief for a large internet company.

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pYoQ8 TIL that aniseed balls were incorporated into limpet mines in the 1930s. The balls were situated between striker and detonator and dissolved in a consistent time of ~35 minutes, allowing saboteurs time to escape after being attached to a target.
0dRej TIL That riveted ships and boilers were made to be water-tight by caulking which, in this case, refers to the process of hammering the face of one steel plate so the deformation will fill the gaps, resulting in a tight seal.
oRmNo TIL that the phrase “Immaculate Conception” refers not to the belief that Mary became pregnant as a virgin, but to the belief that she was conceived without the “original sin” described in the book of Genesis that everyone else is born with.
gmb TIL that Nasa handed out 370 pieces of moon rock gathered from the Apollo missions, of these 184 are unaccounted for having been lost or stolen including one now in a Dublin landfill. They have also been offered for sale on the black market for $5m.
Bg48b TIL that when IBM tasked Bill Gates with the creation of a OS for their computer Gates didn't have one nor he knew how to make one, so he bought one (DOS) from a local company for $75k, hired an engineer to adapt it to IBM machines and sold it for millions to IBM without ever writing a line of code.