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164

TIL the first “Got Milk” commercial was directed by Michael Bay

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RPLa TIL Vincent Van Gogh did not complete his first major work of art until 5 years before his death, and that his body of work went mostly unnoticed until after his suicide.
R7V77 TIL the biggest infrastructure project in the U.S. ($512 BILLION), the Interstate Highway System, was built and championed by Eisenhower in 1956, because he thought it was virtually impossible to travel US roads after experiencing the German Autobahn in WW2 during his experience as General.
wLov8 TIL the first planet we landed probes on besides earth was not Mars but Venus
rRaBw TIL that Ramanujan's lost notebook, discovered 56 years after his death, contained the mock theta functions that have been found to be useful for calculating the entropy of black holes. The unordered sheets contained over six hundred mathematical formulas listed consecutively without proofs.
VBMo8 TIL 19th century Londoners too poor to afford beds would rent boxes to sleep in. Those who couldn't afford the box would instead rent a rope, strung out wall-to-wall, and sleep with their torso hanging over it