› added 8 years ago

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TIL the third leading cause of death in America - behind heart disease and cancer - is medical error, claiming 251,000 lives each year, higher than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke and Alzheimer’s.

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b9R90 TIL A font called Doves Type was lost in 1917 after one of the creators threw the printing blocks into the River Thames. Some of it was recovered by divers in 2015
0d6nN TIL in 1928, the co-founder of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle Sr. made his son, Carl Jr., the studio head as a 21st birthday gift. Universal already had a reputation then for nepotism - 70 of Carl Sr.'s relatives were once on the payroll. This led to their downfall as owners of the studio in 1936
eMrJ TIL that James Earl Jones once used the handle “Darth Vader” while travelling across the country and spoke, in character, to truck drivers on the CB radio. Apparently, the drivers would really freak out so he stopped doing it.
bZ6E TIL that the PlayStation arose from a cancelled collaboration between Nintendo and Sony to integrate a CD drive into the SNES
kObN4 TIL before her career as a well known TV chef Julia Childs worked for the OSS during World War II (a fact only made public after the files were declassified in 2008) where she transcribed Top Secret documents and went on to develop a new shark repellent.