› added 4 years ago

399

TIL that The Flaming Lips have to pay half of all royalties for the song ‘Fight Test’ to Yusuf Islam after he sued them for ripping off his ‘Father and Son’. Despite the songs’ striking similarity, Lips’ frontman Wayne Coynes said it was unintended and he only realised when his producer heard it

9KK6 TIL Most alarms and sirens fall into the frequency range 1-3 kHz where the human hearing is the most sensitive, but this frequency range is also a black spot in our sound location abilities.
YpPbd TIL During a 1989 Christmas television broadcast, Santa Claus encouraged all children to hold the phone to the TV, tricking them into dialing a 1-900 number that automatically charged several dollars to their parents' phone bill.
X0anR TIL that Leonardo da Vinci’s private life has sparked centuries of speculation about his sexuality, with Sigmund Freud analyzing his desires in Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood and Walter Isaacson suggesting he had homosexual relationships with male pupils.
epExJ TIL in 1912 Republican presidential candidate Robert M. La Follette gave a speech to a group of 500 journalists in which he berated the group as being corrupt and working with the trusts. The group was shocked and thought he had a mental breakdown; a friend quipped he’d “killed himself politically.”
oBX8L TIL people would come and go during movies before Psycho. Hitchcock required theaters to not allow people in after it started. It was after that when people would watch entire movies more regularly from start to end