› added 7 years ago

86

TIL that Sacha Baron Cohen, known for playing brainless idiots, has a degree in history from the University of Cambridge

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Znvp TIL when congress asked physicist R.R. Wilson to justify the US government spending millions of dollars on a new particle accelerator (Fermilab), Wilson testified that the knowledge gained from it would have “nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.”
MeK67 TIL Samuel L. Jackson was expelled from his college by locking the board members in a building in protest; one of them being Martin Luthor King Sr.
ep6k6 TIL that in the early '80s the CIA helped facilitate the widespread sale of cocaine in poor L.A. neighborhoods to help finance the covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The journalist who revealed this later killed himself after a smear campaign.
loox1 TIL that a "domino computer" was once constructed, that could add two three-bit inputs and produce a four-bit output. It was made of dominoes standing on end, and relied on timing and precise placement when they were knocked over.
GAWJJ TIL it is illegal to run out of fuel on Germany's Autobahn