› added 8 years ago

287

TIL of Ning Li, who claimed to discovered antigravity, was hired by the DoD and paid 500k a year, but never heard of again publicly.

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OlNR TIL Rick Astley has only earned 12 bucks from YouTube in royalties.
D1V5D TIL "The day of two noons,” November 18, 1883, when people were required to stop what they were doing and reset their clocks anywhere from two to thirty minutes in the adoption of standard time zones.
epm06 TIL There are 36 million Americans of Irish descent and only 5 million people currently living in Ireland (of whom 4 million are ethnically Irish). If your ancestors lived in Ireland in the 1800s, you are 9 times more likely to live in the USA than Ireland.
M74v8 TIL 3 men escaped Alcatraz in a raft made of raincoats. The FBI never found them.
BrnRk TIL Isaac Asimov was not a fan of Orwell's 1984, saying about it in 1980: more people bought it and talked about it than read it, for it is a dreadfully dull book - didactic, repetitious, and all but motionless.