› added 9 years ago

104

TIL: The leader of the Church of Scientology served as Tom Cruise’s best man at his wedding and his own wife disappeared in 2007 after she “filled several job vacancies without her husband’s permission”.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

Me9dB TIL The only copies of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Beowulf" are unique manuscripts that came from the same private library -- both were nearly destroyed in a fire in 1731,
7rwWZ TIL a first time deer hunter named Sergio Martinez, who got lost in the woods of San Diego county in 2003, set a small fire to signal rescuers. The fire quickly got out of control and became the Cedar Fire burning nearly 300,000 acres of land, destroying more than 2200 homes and killing 15 people.
epmK4 TIL that American physicist Richard Feynman once faced off against a Japanese abacus expert to see which could calculate faster. The abacus consistently won on more simple operations, but Feynman was faster in division and complex calculations such as cube roots.
P184n TIL of the world's oldest known song: The Hurrian Hymn (written 1400 BCE)
epeE4 TIL that the WWII Japanese military had a wildfire campaign targeted at the USA, launching some 9,000 fire balloons into the jet stream, with an estimated 11% reaching the U.S. between November 1944 and April 1945. In the end the balloon bombs caused a total of six fatalities.