› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Ernest Hemingway’s mother disliked his first book, The Sun Also Rises, apparently claiming he was “prostituting a great talent” and “pandering to sensationalism”

Read more nytimes.com

via reddit.com

VMEem The atomic clocks that mark official time lose the equivalent of just 1 second every 200 million years. But metrologists are not satisfied.
WkZkL TIL that in 1950 US Navy sprayed thought to be harmless bacteria over the SF Bay Area, as an experiment on potential biological attack. It was followed by spikes in cases of very rare urinary infections and pneumonia. Between 1949 and 1969 open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times
B6Or TIL Netflix, iTunes, Hulu and Amazon have all refused to stream the 200th and 201st episode of South Park due to the appearance of Muhammad in them. They are currently unavailable to watch anywhere legally as South Park was also forced to partially censor the episodes on the DVD releases.
PWQL TIL that there is a massive “undergound river”, or aquifer that runs about 4 kilometers below the Amazon river for 6000 kilometers, following roughly the Amazon river’s flow. It eventually empties in the Atlantic Ocean deep below the surface. It was only discovered in 2011.
5YQa9 TIL J.K. Rowling wrote to Natalie McDonald, a leukemia patient, the ending of The Goblet of Fire a year early. She died before reading the email so Rowling named a character after her. That character was sorted into Gryffindor.