› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Steven Spielberg dropped out of university when he was just a few credits short of graduating. Three decades later he returned, passing his advanced filmmaking class by submitting Schindler’s List.

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NGZJ TIL to skip all DVD trailers and warnings, hit STOP, STOP, PLAY on the remote control
BgB8x TIL that Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina, widely regarded as a potential future star until 1979, was rushed back to training after an injury and pressured to perform a dangerous move (the Thomas salto), which resulted in a broken neck and left her a quadriplegic. She passed away at 46 in 2006.
7roL7 TIL That J. R. R. Tolkien began work on The Hobbit one day early in the 1930s, when he was marking School papers. He found a blank page. Suddenly inspired, he wrote the words, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”
6EVal TIL that the text in ReCAPTCHA security codes looks so strange because they're actually helping to digitize books and other text. The company has designed their system so that humans enter the words optical character recognition software can't recognize. Their old slogan was "Stop spam, read books."
4yQN TIL Kurdish women are fighting ISIS because ISIS members believe they will go directly to hell if they are killed by a woman.