› added 2 years ago

78

TIL that St. Jude Children's Research Hospital was founded by a comedian. He was struggling financially and vowed that if he ever became successful, he’d build a shrine to the patron saint of hopeless causes.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

ek85 TIL of a terrorist strategy to avoid tracked emails is for one terrorist to compose an email, save it as a draft, while another terrorist logs into the same account to read and delete the draft.
Ry77 TIL the Harris hawk is the only raptor that hunts in packs. Their strategy is similar to that of wolves.
oRnMK TIL Proximity fuses were invented jointly by UK & US in WW II. A secret guarded to a similar level as the atom bomb project, and for years not fired on Germans for fear of them figuring it out. It allowed UK anti-V1 artillery to go from 17% to 74% effective. Julius Rosenberg was able to steal one.
w4k1 TIL In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Ferengi were initially created to succeed the Klingons as the new villainous arch rivals of the Federation. After their debut episode, they were rewritten to subsequently be comic foils due to producers finding their appearance comical and nonthreatening.
R7XZ8 TIL that the reason many Hanna Barbera characters had collars and ties was to save money on animation. Separating the head and body allows the body to remain static while the head is animated. This made it so a seven minute cartoon only required around 2,000 drawings, as opposed to the usual 14,000