› added 12 years ago

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TIL when Astronaut Ed Mitchell was asked what it’s like to stand on the moon, he said: “From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

E1ow7 TIL about Soong Mei-Ling, the sister-in-law of Sun Yat-sen and the wife of Chiang Kai-shek. Her life traversed three centuries, and she lived through pretty much all the forms of government that China has tried - emperor, republic, communism, dictatorship.
4RR5 TIL billionaire J. Paul Getty refused to pay $17m ransom for his kidnapped Grandson. When the teenager’s severed ear arrived, he agreed $3m but only paid $2.2m… the maximum that would be tax deductable. He lent the other $800k to his son on the condition that he pay it back with 4% interest.
KO0JJ TIL that although it is commonly shown in medical dramas, you do not shock someone with a flatline. You only use defibrillators on people with ventricular fibrillation, and pulseless ventricular tachycardia (heart beats out of rhythm or heart beats that are really fast and out of sync)
XEMWP TIL the film The China Syndrome, a movie about a nuclear meltdown caused by a faulty sensor reading and a stuck-open pressure release valve, aired only 12 days before the 3 Mile Island Meltdown, caused by a faulty sensor reading and a stuck open pressure release valve
wp48 TIL that Theodore Roosevelt vocally disapproved of putting “In God We Trust” on US currency, saying “It seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins, just as it would be to cheapen it by use on postage stamps, or in advertisements.”