› added 9 years ago

485

TIL that Alan Turing, the pioneering computer scientist / cryptographer, and Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, worked together during WWII. They rarely agreed on anything.

Read more theguardian.com

via reddit.com

8avBZ TIL that the stunt man for the Tin Man in the Wizard of OZ (1939) is still alive at 101. In one scene that had to be re-shot he accidentally pulled off the Cowardly Lion's tail.
vPGDD TIL the novel "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" (1978) by Alan Dean Foster was originally written as a low-budget sequel to "Star Wars" (1977) in the event that film would financially fail. Instead, after the film's success, the novel became among the first works in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
BJbK TIL: There is a search engine company that uses 80% of his revenue to plant trees. It is from Germany.
mV4M TIL in 1964, a man photographing his daughter in a marsh captured what appears to be an astronaut standing behind her; he claims no one else was present in the shot other than the girl
9lr7 TIL NASA Managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard Challenger, but Richard Feynman discovered that NASA’s Engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200.