› added 8 years ago

95

TIL in 1977, William Kampiles stole a top-secret KH-11 spy satellite manual from the CIA which he sold to the Russians for $3000. He then told the CIA for who he worked what he had done in the hopes that they would hire him as a double agent. They didn’t and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Read more wikipedia.org

via ift.tt

4Xn1X TIL in 1981 the landlord visited the warehouse of Nintendo of America to collect overdue rent and berated the president, Minoru Arakawa, in front of employees. The new game, Donkey Kong, was about to be released and they changed the character's name to their landlord's name: Mario.
b9e4p TIL That ants are self aware. In an experiment researchers painted blue dots onto ants bodies, and presented them with a mirror. 23 out of 24 tried scratching the dot, indicating that the ants could see the dots on themselves.
LQMbV TIL that the library career of the creator of the Dewey Decimal system, Melvil Dewey ended in disgrace, because of his groping of female librarians. Dewey also insisted on seeing photographs of the women before he would hire them, to determine if they were attractive or not.
vZ5r TIL A Dutch crime writer wrote a pretty suspicious book about seven ways to kill your spouse a year after his wife disappeared. He became a celebrity and spent the next decade hinting - in print and on TV - that he had murdered her. Finally, it turned out that he really had.
PAbJ TIL when the girl featured on the front cover of Vampire Weekend’s ‘Contra’ album artwork found out about the illegal use of her 26 year old photo, she sued the band. She found out when her daughter brought home a copy of the album one day.