› added 13 years ago

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TIL: In 1976 there was a wine tasting in Paris that blindly compared Californian wines to French wines. California won and the lone reporter covering the event was blacklisted for reporting it.

v1xEB TIL: Some scientists say certain objects' unexpected orbits must be due to the presence of a gigantic planet beyond the solar system's Pluto. However, an emerging theory says the region's gravitational anomalies are better explained if the proposed object instead is a tiny early-stage black hole.*
kO1dg TIL that in 1939, George Dantzig, arrived late for class and assumed that the two problems written on the board was a homework assignment. When turning it in, he apologized for taking long to finish; it turned out that he had solved two estwhile unsolved / unproved problems in statistics.
ANR64 TIL A Fourth Spy Kids Movie was planned for a Late 2004 release, with Josh Hartnett eyed as the main villain, but it never went into pre-production and was simply an idea. A fourth Spy Kids movie eventually came out (with little to no continuity with the first 3 movies) in 2011.
Oo5AR TIL that olives are essentially inedible when picked. It takes an extensive curing process for them to become edible, with no history of how an inedible fruit became such a popular fruit.
R7o18 TIL that Dr. Seuss was childless, but invented a whole clan of fictional offspring with bizarre talents that he could bring up whenever friends annoyed him by boasting about their own kids' accomplishments. He even got a group of neighborhood kids into posing as them for a fake Christmas card photo