› added 12 years ago

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TIL that the initial probability of getting shot in the first round in Russian Roulette is not 1 in 6 , since the weight of the bullet makes the spinning cylinder more likely to stop with the bullet at the bottom.

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5YE4k TIL of the chariot race sequence in Ben-Hur (1959): the set was the largest ever built at the time and took over a year and thousands of workers to build; the director's son, a stuntman, almost died; the extras rioted on camera; and the cars filming the race were slower than the horses
6pr8 TIL that payed, a common misspelling of paid, is an actual word that means an act of sealing the deck or seams of wooden ships with pitch to prevent water leakage. This makes it an atomic typo(link in comments)
rore TIL Tesla’s entire production line once completely stopped due to a $3 USB cable being accidentally unplugged
6LPW TIL that due to naturally-occurring potassium isotopes in a banana, using it as a “banana-phone” delivers a higher, albeit tiny dose of ionizing (DNA-damaging) radiation into your head compared an actual cellphone, which only emits non-ionizing radiation.
OGYO4 TIL that in the 1960s, the US roasted a 1440-acre swath of Wisconsin forest with ~10,000 curies of radiation for 6 months in order to determine how it affected the area. Most of the damage was confined to the area directly adjacent to the source, and the area is completely non-hazardous today.