› added 6 years ago

130

TIL of Steve Rothstein, who took advantage of American Airlines' AAirpass (a promotion that offered lifetime unlimited flights for $250k). He accumulated more than 30M miles, costing them $1M per year. He would often book a "companion" just for elbow room, putting the ticket under "Bag Rothstein"

Read more articles.latimes.com

via reddit.com

j6yMQ TIL about the Ham Sandwich Theorem, which states that states that given n measurable "objects" in n-dimensional Euclidean space, it is possible to divide each one of them in half (with respect to their measure, e.g. volume) with a single (n − 1)-dimensional hyperplane.
ddNj TIL of Henry Moseley, who rearranged the Periodic Table based on atomic mass and died aged only 27 in WW1. Isaac Asimov said of his death, ‘in view of what he might still have accomplished … his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally’.
ZoJQ TIL in 2010 a class action lawsuit was brought against a Pennsylvania school district for using webcams in school-issued laptop computers to spy on students at home. After the suit was brought, the district revealed it had secretly snapped more than 66,000 images.
jNnGR TIL about the moon landing’s ‘Human Computers’. Who were a group of women, who held math and science degrees, and were responsible for managing the moon landing’s incredibly complex calculations. They also did it real-time, by written hand, and were faster than any technology available before 1970.
mORM TIL that the French military actually has the best military record in the world having won 723 of the 1211 battles they fought in the last 800 years