› added 11 months ago

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TIL in 2013, JCPenney sold a stainless steel tea kettle that attracted controversy due to its perceived resemblance to Adolf Hitler.

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XW7k TIL An American NASA scientist has been in solitary confinement in Turkey for over eight months, the evidence against him being one US dollar bill.
v1LrR TIL that engineers at IBM had to hand weave their memory 14KB in total for both control and redundancy of their flight computer in the SATURN V launch vehicle. Wire shaped inside the mesh represented a bit based on the magnetic field generated by the direction of current flowing through it.
7rokL TIL Keanu Reeves was initially offered Val Kilmer's role in the 1995 film Heat. He turned it down to play Hamlet in a 789 seat theatre in Manitoba.
JYpAV TIL about the Banach–Tarski Paradox where mathematically it is possible to split an object in to multiple parts and recombine them into two exact copies of the original without adding new material.
7ronp TIL an astronomer travelled to India in 1760 to observe Venus. His ship blew off course, and he missed the date. He stayed in India for 8 years to try again, but the sky was too cloudy. When he returned home, he had been declared dead, his wife remarried, his estate plundered, and his job lost