› added 6 years ago

89

TIL that Ernest Hemingway lived through anthrax, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, skin cancer, hepatitis, anemia, diabetes, high blood pressure, two plane crashes, a ruptured kidney, a ruptured spleen, a ruptured liver, a crushed vertebra, and a fractured skull.

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via reddit.com

nMWb TIL The Concorde supersonic jet stretched during flight due to the heat it generated. On its final flight the crew placed their hats into a crevice in the floor which appeared during the flight, as the aircraft cooled the crevice closed, permanently sealing their hats in the aluminum airframe.
PY9XZ TIL Grand Theft Auto V cost $265 million to make -- the largest budget of any video game at that time -- but turned around and made $1 billion in its first 72 hours
NepJ TIL Chinese guerrillas during WWII were given bags of flour, mixed with the powdery white high explosive HMX, to bypass Japanese checkpoints. The resulting mixture could safely be cooked into pancakes and eaten. Leftover dough and pastries could still be used as explosives. Code name: “Aunt Jemima.”
N7bV8 TIL that in Taiwan, Father's Day is on August 8th. This was determined by the fact that the eighth (ba) day of the eighth (ba) month makes two "eights" (八八, ba-ba), which sounds similar to the colloquial word for "daddy" (ba-ba，爸爸)
jNMxN TIL: China creates so much synthetic diamonds that are identical to real diamonds that prices of diamonds are being driven down and De Beers has created a university to study how to identify "natural" and "man made" diamonds because no experts can tell the difference.