› added 10 years ago

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TIL that cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev has traveled 0.02 seconds into the future. The theory of relativity states that time will slow down for an object as its velocity increases. By orbiting at 27,360 km/h for 747 days aboard the Mir space station, Avdeyev aged 0.02 seconds less than people on Earth.

YpLkB TIL Away from home, Dickens would realign his bed to face north, and he had to be facing north before he could write, as he felt this would foster his creativity.
yVvjJ TIL The specific wording "the pen is mightier than the sword" was first used by author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839, the same guy whose intro sentence “It was a dark and stormy night.” inspired a contest for the worst opening sentence for a novel.
Zp7Ba TIL that in 2004, actor Carmine Caridi, star of “The Godfather”, was expelled from the Academy for making VCR copies of promotional screeners and sharing them with friends and family.
0dJ1M TIL Charles Perrault's Cinderella was originally believed to be a sexual innuendo. The words verre (glass) and vair (fur) sound the same in French, which suggests the Prince "tried on the fur slipper of all the maidens in the land."
gMVBD TIL During the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, to help USA/USSR relations, astronauts and cosmonauts played smuggled audio recordings of glasses clinking, laughter, and many female voices. Houston radioed to ask what’s going on. "Oh nothing,” they said. “We finished work, just having a party up here."