› added 5 years ago

80

TIL about history's most expensive "hyphen" when a NASA programmer missed out a single hyphen whilst transcribing a mathematical formula for the guidance system which caused an entire NASA rocket launch to be aborted and the rocket destroyed.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

4kJ75 TIL that after a rural Ohio county reported nearly 70 cases of leukemia in the mid 90s, it was discovered that a local high school had been built on an Army depot used as a dump for chemical waste.
neJwr TIL Blanks can injure or kill a person if used in close range. a known case is of actor Jon Erik-Hexum. Bored by delays while filming, he pointed a gun loaded with blanks to his head and reportedly said, “Can you believe this crap?” before pulling the trigger.
N7Q68 TIL that an "unpaired word" is a word that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word, but does not. Examples include disgruntled, nonchalant, and ruthless.
9GeD TIL that after five months, Guns N’ Roses’ first album attracted only modest interest. MTV then humored a request from their label by airing “Welcome to the Jungle” at 4am on a Sunday. Sales exploded, eventually selling 15 million copies in the US alone, one of the best debuts in history.
4k0oR TIL the name "Chilean seabass" was invented by a fish wholesaler named Lee Lantz in 1977. He was looking for a name to make the Patagonian toothfish attractive to the American market. In 1994, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration accepted "Chilean seabass" as an "alternative market name" for it.