› added 5 years ago

196

TIL of Benito "Benny" Agrelo, a 15 y.o. born with a malfunctioning liver, underwent 2 liver transplants, and took 8 different medications 3 times/day since age 8, with major side effects. He stopped the meds, knowing he would die, but the state tried to force him to resume. He won in court and died.

yVnJX TIL that in 1956, IBM released it's first "hard drive" called RAMAC—short for Random Access Method of Accounting And Control—which held less than 5 megabytes of storage and occupied an entire room. RAMAC was leased for $3,200 a month, the equivalent of $28,000 in 2016.
7rQoL TIL the movie District 9 was made with the money originally planned to make the video game movie Halo. The decision was made by the studios to not make Halo the day they were to start shooting it so instead Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp started making District 9.
KYGlE TIL 'Project West Ford,' a 1963 attempt by the US military to create an artificial ionosphere above Earth. They launched 480 million tiny copper needles into space to facilitate global radio communication. The project was short-lived, and the needles eventually clumped together and fell out of orbit
GYl7 TIL there’s an Immortality Drive on the I.S.S. that has the DNA sequence of Stephen Colbert
LLg9 TIL calorie counts in food labels are based on 19th century research, that has been dismissed since, as being vague approximations that don’t project the truth that the calories we get change considerably depending on the structure of the food, how it is processed, and the physiology of the eater