› added 11 years ago

162

TIL a 1997 study on affirmative action showed that, controlling for grades and SAT scores, “Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans.”

Read more boston.com

via reddit.com

gDLb TIL Sean Connery was offered the role of Gandalf in the Lord of The Rings trilogy. He was offered 15% of worldwide box-office receipts, totaling close to $400 million. He turned it down due to “not understanding the script”.
D1bXD TIL Kodak operated a secret nuclear reactor in the basement of their headquarters for 30 years.
XE8JQ TIL in the rushed rampup to train military pilots during World War II from a thousand graduates in 1939 to hundreds of thousands by 1945, over 15,000 Americans died in nearly 30,000 crashes in stateside training alone
R7jLj TIL the CIA once tried to scare Pakistani children with Osama Bin Laden toys in which its skin would peel off to reveal a demon face.
4rdX TIL Martin Luther King Jr. engaged in extramarital affairs throughout his life. “[MLK] understood and believed in the biblical prohibition against sex outside marriage. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.”