› added 5 years ago

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TIL The Scunthorpe Problem. Automatic profanity filters on the Internet see banned words inside other words and create problems for users. It is named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's filter prevented Scunthorpe residents from creating accounts due to the unfortunate substring it contains.

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QJXNe TIL Disney changed the name of their project "Basil of Baker Street" to The Great Mouse Detective", causing Disney animators to pass around a joke memo blandly renaming old Disney classics. It reached the CEO of Disney, who was furious and demanded to know who wrote the memo. No one squealed.
8ey8X TIL: Squirrels gather nuts and seeds during the fall and bury them in the ground or hide them in their nests over a large area (scatterhoarding), and often forget them, resulting in new trees (mutualism). In winter, they eat them after finding the buried nuts.
JrGk TIL two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, a task force rescued around 1400 frozen embryos stranded in a hospital without power. The embryos were considered to be people under Louisiana law.
R7w44 TIL the grizzly scene in Pulp Fiction where Travolta jams a needle into Uma Thurman's chest to try to revive her from her overdose was actually filmed backwards.
GYBe4 TIL before his murder, James Fannin made three requests: he asked for his personal possessions to be sent to his family, to be shot in his heart and not his face, and to be given a Christian burial. The Mexican soldiers took his belongings, shot him in the face, and burned Fannin's body.