› added 12 years ago

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TIL that Anaïs Nin, a French-Cuban author, led two completely separate lives in California and New York, spanning several decades. She would commute between states on a weekly basis. Neither of her husbands became aware of this until after her death.

awoGN TIL of the word "inkhorn", a 16th century derogrity term for scholars who excessively and awkwardly borrowed words from Latin. They introduced short-lived words like ("devulgate, obtestate, deruncinate, subsecive") but also gave us everday words like ("Celebrate, expectation, ingenious, mundane").
Jmvl TIL Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for the nuclear weapons. To emphasize the monster’s relationship with the atomic bomb, its skin texture was inspired by the keloid scars seen on survivors in Hiroshima.
jOKN TIL while in prison, mucisian MF Grimm paid $100,000 for 1 day bail to record an entire album. While in prison he studied law and reduced his life sentence to 3 years.
X0gyD TIL physicist Ludwig Boltzmann also taught philosophy and his lectures on the subject became so popular that the Austrian Emperor invited him for a reception. He suffered from bipolar disorder and died by suicide at 62. His tombstone bears the inscription of his own entropy formula: S = k*log W.
loxlA TIL that particle physicist John Ellis lost a bet and had to include the word "penguin" in his next scientific paper. After struggling to find a way to include the word, he "smoked some illegal substance" which gave him the inspiration for the now important Penguin Diagrams.