› added 7 years ago

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TIL During his 2009 TED talk, Bill Gates opened a jar of mosquitoes saying “Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some… I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected” & waited for ~a minute before telling the audience that the bugs were malaria-free.

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Z85lR TIL The first computer virus 'Creeper System' (1971) was an experimental self-replicating program. It was not designed to cause damage, but left a message "I'm the creeper: catch me if you can". It moved between mainframe computers on ARPANET (US Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)
7ENb TIL that Will Smith refused to play the role of Mohammed Ali for 8 years, fearing he wasn’t up for the job of playing the man he called the “greatest figure over the last 100 years”, stating “I absolutely, positively did not want to be the dude that messed up the Muhammad Ali story.”
NXGxE TIL: 21 year old P.T. Barnum became a bit of a liberal celebrity after publishing an article excoriating a local church dignitary for the crime of “taking usury of an orphan boy." Which landed Barnum in jail for more than two months.
lNa7 TIL That a Syrian Bear had the rank of Corporal in the Polish Army during WW2, and after the War would be visited by former soldiers from his company and given cigarettes, which he would eat because there was no one to light them for him.
epW14 TIL that crosswalks are called zebra crossings in the U.K.