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TIL that Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was at the forefront of the counterculture’s experimentation with psychedelics, which led to his 1954 work The Doors of Perception. Dying from cancer, he asked his wife on 22 November 1963 to inject him with 100 µg of LSD. He died later that day.

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16xX7 TIL David Bowie, a tech visionary, launched his own internet service provider called BowieNet in 1998, offering users exclusive content, email addresses, and even web hosting
A76a TIL Obsidian blades are so sharp (3 nm thickness) that, on a cellular level, obsidian knives will cut between cells rather than tear the cells as steel knives would do
Wvm8 TIL companies such as Google, Lego and Xerox regularly work to avoid the risk of their trademarked names becoming genericized, because if those terms become fully generalized terms for ‘internet search’, 'interconnecting plastic block’ or 'photocopy’, then they could lose those trademarks.
epyd6 TIL about the Olympus Scandal centering around Japanese camera maker Olympus hiding massive investment losses totaling $1.7 billion through an elaborate accounting fraud that lasted for at least 13 years before being exposed in 2011
jdnQ TIL that pencils are yellow because, in the 1890’s, the world’s best pencil graphite came from China. In China, the color yellow is associated with royalty, so American pencil manufacturers started painting their pencils yellow to indicate they contained high-quality Chinese graphite.