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TIL the secret codename of India's first successful nuclear weapon test was "Smiling Buddha."

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jN5Dp TIL the earliest recorded use of LOL as an initialism was for "little old lady" in the 1960s. During the Apollo mission, ferrite cores were used as transformers and acted as either a binary one or zero. The LOLs created the required software by weaving together sequences of one and zero cores.
j6wXj TIL Geoffrey Holder (7Up Uncola guy, and Bond villain) won 2 Tony awards for The Wiz (Director, Costumes)
6Egv8 TIL that in "Man on the Moon", Jim Carrey and Jerry Lawler had an actual feud. Carrey spat in Lawler's face and got him fired. When Lawler was rehired for the Letterman segment, he retaliated by slapping him as hard as he could - much harder than he slapped the real Kaufman during their fake feud.
Bgg8b TIL about Sokushinbutsu, a practice of self-mummification observed by Japanese Buddhist monks. The monks would follow a strict starvation diet until abstaining from eating altogether in order to lose as much body fat and moisture as possible. They would finally be locked in a tomb while still alive.
PB8g Til that Pakistan puts nuclear warheads in unmarked vans and drives them around the country in a never ending road trim to “keep them safe.”