› added 8 years ago

140

TIL - When Jeopardy was brought to syndication in 1984, the producers were told to make the answers easier to appeal to a broader audience. The agreed but changed nothing, leading to the frustratingly difficult show we love today.

Read more mentalfloss.com

via ift.tt

0wrY1 Today I learned Howard Hughes loved banana nut ice cream so much his aides convinced Baskin-Robbins to produce a 350 gallon special order of the discontinued product. A few days later he grew tired of it and decided he only wanted French Vanilla so his hotel gave away the ice cream to customers.
5wQB TIL on August 16, 1942, a military blimp left San Francisco bay on a routine submarine-spotting mission. A few hours later, the airship wandered back over land and crashed with nobody aboard. Life rafts and other gear had not been touched. To this day the two man crew has never been found.
Zppk4 TIL that the picture of George Washington on the $1 bill is based off an unfinished portait of him.
rRyLe TIL Over two years, during the time of the Great Plague of 1665-6, young Isaac Newton developed a new theory of light, discovered and quantified gravitation, and pioneered a revolutionary new approach to mathematics: infinitesimal calculus
OLmY TIL that in 2006, it took Akira Haraguchi, a retired Japanese engineer, 16 hours to recite the first 100,000 digits of pi from memory only. To prove that the exercice was legitimate, everything was filmed, even his trips to the toilet. Despite this, he has yet to receive a Guinness World Record.