› added 8 years ago

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TIL On June 28, 2009, Stephen Hawking held a party open to all, complete with hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne, but only publicized the party after it was over so that only time-travellers would know to attend; as expected, nobody showed up to the party.

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Y7jZ TIL that former journalist Solomon Shereshevsky appeared to have no limits on his ability to memorize, memorizing poems in foreign languages (which he could not understand) within minutes and recalling them verbatim years later; however he could not recognize faces because they were so “changeable.”
epkmJ TIL: there is a lake in Uttarakhand (India) called Roopkund Lake or the "Skeleton Lake" which has he skeletal remains of an estimated 600-800 people, some of them date back to around 1,200 years.
OGgxa TIL that the origin of why married couples become 'one' & women take their husband's surname dates back to the 1600s, where coverture prohibited women from having any legal identity or rights b/c they were considered 'one' with the husband and therefore subsumed his identity.
0w6Mv TIL 19-yr-old Eric Simons squatted at AOL HQ to work on his startup. When a mentorship ended, his badge still gave access; for 2 months he got basic free food from the lounge, used the showers, locker, & gym, did wash at AOL's free laundromat, & rotated sleep on 3 couches to evade night security.
KQ4R TIL Iran only classes three organizations as terrorist groups, and two of them are the CIA and the American Army.