› added 11 years ago

105

TIL that prior to creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams appeared in two Monty Python sketches, the first being episode 42.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

5YlyD TIL that Mirrors didn’t exist until circa 500 BC so the only way people knew what they looked like was by looking at their reflection in still water. Thus, water was a symbol of the self and a symbol of death.
dPbr TIL that Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence, later became one of it’s leading critics when he found his secretary getting very emotionally involved with ELIZA, a chatbot that he himself programmed.
RNA4 TIL the CEO of Susan G. Komen for the Cure makes nearly $700K a year, about 25% more than other non-profits of comparible size, while only spending about 20% of its yearly funds on research for a cure for breast cancer.
69QDw TIL: Some McDonald's Restaurants only have one arch because that was the original design to hold up the signs.
dDQpK TIL That in 2013 a 28 year old woman in Chembur, India had to undergo emergency surgery to remove a 'football sized' fecal mass after she had not had a bowel movement for 45 days.