› added 9 years ago

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TIL that a man lived at the AOL hq for 2 months. He used the showers and food court. While everyone else thought he worked there he was actually working on his own startup.

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LQvdm TIL As a teenager Bernhard Riemann finished all 900 pages in Legendre's book on the Theory of Numbers in six days. Riemann later challenged what the dimension of real space was and what geometry described real space, ideas too far ahead of its time to be appreciated by most scientists of that time
aw08Z TIL Steven Russell escaped from prison by using laxatives to fake the symptoms of AIDS. He then called the prison, posing as a doctor, asking for prisoners interested in an experimental treatment, and volunteered. Once out of Texas, he sent a death certificate to the prison stating he had died.
1o4X TIL The earliest form of RAM stored data as sound waves. Bits would be ‘thumped’ into a tube filled with mercury, then read by sensor on the other end. The computer was free to do other things during the relative eternity it took the bits moving at the speed of sound rather than the speed of light.
69rNW TIL that a working nuclear bomb can be designed by three PhD level Physicists in about two years — and that experiment was done in the 60s with them having no specialised knowledge in nuclear physics
GYm0N TIL that the US $2 bill is still being produced in large numbers. The apparent scarcity of the bill is caused by collectors taking it out of circulation because they think that it is rarer than it actually is.