› added 5 years ago

161

TIL the inventor of the Erector Set also released an "Atomic Energy Laboratory" that included real uranium ore. One suggested activity was to play "hide and seek with the gamma ray source" by using the included Geiger counter to find a radioactive sample hidden in a room.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

byx4 TIL in 1440 a clerical error accidentally gave independence to a square mile of Italy, forming an anarchist republic that lasted over four hundred years.
b9Vb0 TIL of composer Frank Churchill, who worked on early Disney films Snow White, Bambi and Dumbo, winning an Oscar for Dumbo. In 1942, just months before the release of Bambi, he shot himself, purportedly "at the piano." He received two posthumous Oscar nominations for his work on the film.
JYpVm TIL that in order to stay in "sync" with the earth's orbit around the sun, we have to skip having a leap year every 100 years, and that every 400 years we have to skip skipping the leap year.
GY1kE TIL a woman who claimed to be abducted by aliens in 1961 later recreated a star map she remembered and a statistician concluded she had a 1 in 1000 chance of randomly guessing a valid pattern if she was making it all up. It was valid.
YL8r TIL that Pamela Anderson once commissioned a painting of herself from renowned pop artist Mel Ramos and when it was finished she couldn’t afford to buy it.