› added 5 years ago

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TIL in April of 1997, the internet faced a blackout due to a single bad router in Florida. The bug spread like a plague across the world, crashing networks everywhere.

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M7AVV TIL airports hire crews of "birdmen" that use methods like horns, sirens, lasers, and pyrotechnics to ward off large groups of birds. They even intentionally remove horizontal branches from nearby trees to discourage large migrations from settling near the runways.
9YLGD TIL the brand name 'Linoleum' is considered the first product name to become a generic term, which happened only 14 years after it was invented.
78L8P TIL Actor Martin Sheen has been arrested more than 60 times for protesting
OoDBR TIL that NeoPets is effectively owned by The Church of Scientology.
16k9X TIL Fritz Lang’s film “Woman in the Moon” is often cited as the first occurrence in media of the "countdown to zero" before a rocket launch. It was so influential that the first successfully launched V-2 rocket at the rocket facility in Peenemünde had the Frau im Mond logo painted on its base.