› added 1 month ago

8

TIL Blanche Kelso Bruce, who served as US senator from Mississippi, was an escaped fugitive slave

Read more nypl.org

via reddit.com

DQBaj TIL that Alan Hale Jr. Was only 43 when he started playing "The Skipper" on Gilligan's Island.
VBYap TIL the Pan Am 747 destroyed in the worst aviation accident 45 years ago at Tenerife was coincidentally also the first 747 to make a commercial flight, the first 747 to be hijacked, was named Clipper Victor, and the Captain was Victor Grubbs
1a6vV Almost nothing looks more orderly than chess pieces before a match starts. The first move, however, begins a spiral into chaos. After both players move, 400 possible board setups exist. After the second pair of turns, there are 197,742 possible games, and after three moves, 121 million. At every turn, players chart a progressively more distinctive path, and each game evolves into one that has probably never been played before.
0dAgM TIL the first Ariane 5 launch failed because software engineers left redundant code from the previous version of the rocket. A 64-bit FP variable was made as an input to a 16 bit integer, resulting in an integer overflow that crashed the rocket's launch computer.
WgOo TIL that astronaut helmets have a patch of Velcro inside of them so astronauts have a way to scratch their noses.