› added 10 years ago

85

TIL of Starfish. A 60’s US military experiment designed to see what would happen when a nuke was detonated 250 miles above Earth’s magnetic pole. It resulted in an EMP 900 miles wide, an intense artificial aurora, and a radiation belt that disabled 1/3 of the low orbit satellites and lasted 5 years.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

DQvbj TIL Stalin, towards the end of his life, routinely forced the politburo to get incredibly drunk. His compulsory dinners featured forced drinking games, such as guessing the temperature and taking a shot of vodka for each degree off.
KYVv9 TIL the anime streaming platform Crunchyroll was first launched as an anime pirating site, and even received venture capital funding while it still allowed uploads of unlicensed content to the site.
RXgQ TIL the Roman Emperor Vespasian hated philosophers, seeing them as “unmanly complainers who talked too much.” One philosopher was banished to an island and still criticized Vespasian, so the Emperor sent a message: “You are doing everything to force me to kill you, but I do not slay a barking dog.”
Bywd TIL when JAL Flight 2 landed in San Francisco Bay short of the runway, captain Kohei Asoh told investigators, “As you Americans say, I fucked up.” Today the “Asoh defense” is hailed by corporate strategists as one of the most effective public relations strategies.
X0Zo8 TIL: At least 10 people have been shot by dogs in the US and almost half of them occur in Florida.