› added 5 years ago

1094

Today I learned that part of the reason Pythagoras hated beans so much was the belief that beans contained the souls of dead people. Hence, when you farted, you farted the souls of your dead ancestors.

oR5EL TIL “Edward Scissorhands” test screenings were so encouraging for 20th Century Fox, the president of the studio considered marketing the film on the scale of “E.T," but decided, “We have to let it find its place. We want to be careful not to hype the movie out of the universe.”
W74Eo TIL 36 seconds after takeoff, Apollo 12 was struck by lightning and the computers, particularly those dealing with telemetry, immediately became garbled. The mission was almost aborted before engineer John Aaron recommended an obscure switch which reset data, saving the mission
BG0b TIL Mark Whalberg served 45 days for attempted murder after beating a middle-aged Vietnamese man unconscious while calling him “Vietnamese f*king sht”
19O7 TIL that despite elephants massive size compared to humans, they are 5 times less likely to die of cancer due to them having at least 40 copies of TP53, a gene that destroys cancer cells before they become a problem, versus 2 in humans.
rMl1 TIL A man who was attacked and beaten outside of a bar turned into a math genius. Jason Padgett never made it past pre-algebra but after the injury, he began seeing the world in pixelated, geometrics shapes, understood the concept of pi and had a sudden ability to hand-draw complex fractals