› added 8 years ago

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TIL that since the MESSENGER probe intentionally crashed onto the surface of Mercury at mission end last year, we now have man-made objects on all four planets inside the asteroid belt.

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lorWa TIL about the Fast Inverse Square Root, an ingenious set of code that quickly calculated accurate square roots in Quake 3 using floating points and Newton's method. However, it is not exactly known who on the dev team implemented the code.
grv18 TIL the first balloons were made out of animal bladders and “balloon animals” were made out of animal intestines
4X79a TIL Winston Churchill, a notorious drinker, circumvented prohibition while visiting the U.S. by obtaining a letter from his doctor prescribing alcohol for treatment following a vehicular accident.
D6nJ TIL in 1842 Queen Victoria had a pistol aimed at her while she was riding a carriage, but the gun misfired and the assassin escaped. The next day she deliberately took the same route to bait the assassin, who subsequently caught.
D1OKJ TIL Romans conquered England during 1st Century AD, then decided it was best to build a wall (Hadrian’s Wall) to keep the Scottish out (ancestors) and protect themselves