› added 4 years ago

328

TIL That the sign above the gates to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which reads 'Arbeit macht frei' (Work Sets You Free), was made by prisoners in the metalworking labor detail. The prisoners deliberately reversed the letter "B" as a camouflaged mark of disobedience.

Read more auschwitz.org

via reddit.com

JBAv TIL that when Tolkien read The Lord of the Rings to his group of literary minds, the Inklings, Hugo Dyson, who was not keen on the work, rolled on the sofa shouting “Oh fuck, not another elf!”
epxD6 TIL if space is infinite, or sufficiently large and uniform, identical instances of the history of Earth's entire Hubble volume may occur every so often, simply by chance. Physicists and Cosmologist Max Tegmark calculated that our nearest so-called doppelgänger is 10^10^115 metres away from us
R7rB7 TIL that when Alexey Pajitnov invented Tetris in 1984, he earned no royalties for it due to living under the Soviet government. It was only in 1996, after he moved to the United States and founded The Tetris Company, that he started making money off of it.
Meo60 TIL that in 1975, three men were wrongfully convicted of murder. Their conviction was solely based on the testimony of a 12-year-old boy who claimed he’d seen them commit the crime. They were only fully exonerated in 2014, when the boy- now an adult, recanted his testimony.
Bgxdd TIL that there is a museum in Iceland devoted to penises. A 95-year-old man donated his penis to it after his death.