› added 12 years ago

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TIL Theodore Roosevelt watched his mother die of typhoid fever and then immediately had to go upstairs and see his wife die of complications from childbirth.

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jNQ5M TIL that Beethoven composed "Fur Elise" for a student he was infatuated with. As she was a mediocre pianist, he made the beginning of the song simple to play. However, she refused to marry him, so he added much harder parts, knowing she would never be able to play it.
v1Bkj TIL In 2013, Saito and Shinozuka researched if cats can recognize the owner's voice. To validate it, they tested cats which have been named. The cats responded the call of their owners and was seen mainly in relation to the cats' ears instead of walking towards the voice.
d8gd9 TIL that several human genes had to be renamed because Excel would auto-format their original names (like SEPT1) into dates and it was causing issues for data storage
9O87 TIL that in 1977, a man attempted to commit suicide by jumping in front of the NYC subway. He survived but was injured, and then received $650,000 in a settlement because the subway operator had “not stopped fast enough”.
R7y08 TIL the 3D graphical file browser used in Jurassic Park was a real UNIX application before the movie and not just Hollywood computer bs