› added 12 years ago

145

TIL that there was a submarine named the USS Kamehameha.

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ng9W TIL it took 12 years before Alexy Pajitnov, creator of Tetris in 1984, received any royalties because the rights to the game were the property of his Soviet government.
lo751 TIL After the Siege of Leningrad was broken, the Soviets wanted to prosecute those who had resorted to cannibalism. However, so many were accused (over two thousand) that the NKVD had to divide them into two groups; 'corpse-eating' and 'person-eating'. The former were jailed, that later were shot
e9xn TIL Charles Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady, listened to a problem generator for two days before marking a spot and telling engineers to replace sixteen windings from a field coil. He itemized the $10,000 invoice thusly: Marking spot - $1; Knowing where to mark - $9,999.
4XGDa TIL about the Nike Decade, a shoe line that was discontinued after members of the cult Heaven's Gate performed a mass suicide while wearing the sneakers. Pairs of the shoes now resell for thousands of dollars.
RDEQ TIL that an estimated 85 people die for every life saved by speed bumps, because while they slow down cars and save pedestrians they also slow down emergency vehicles that might otherwise save people.