Nate
Today I learned that there’s a place online where people can share all of the neat, random, and interesting things with each other and the submissions are so great, we had to share them with you.
When I was in school I always thought that after I graduate, I must have learned everything there is to learn but we all know that’s ridiculous. We should learn something new every day, or at least try to.
So why not start with Reddit’s “Today I Learned” and then you’ll have something new to bring up the next time you’re at a wedding that you don’t know anyone at.
1.
“TIL that slaveholders in the US knew that enslaved people were escaping to Mexico, the U.S. tried to get Mexico to sign a fugitive slave treaty, but Mexico refused to sign such a treaty, insisting that all enslaved people were free once they set foot on Mexican soil.”
2.
“TIL During an interview with Stephen Hawking, the camera operator yanked a cable causing an alarm and Hawking to slump forward. Worried they had killed him, everyone rushed over to find Hawking giggling at his own joke. The alarm was from an office computer losing power.”
3.
“TIL Genghis Khan would marry off a daughter to the king of an allied nation. Then he would assign his new son-in-law to military duty in the Mongol wars, while his daughter took over the rule. Most sons-in-law died in combat, giving his daughters complete control of these nations”
4.
“TIL a fan drove three hours to deliver rapper, Boozie Badazz, a much-needed dosage of insulin. She refused to accept payment and instead asked for just a photo. On her way home, she stopped at a store, bought a scratch-off ticket, and won $10,000.”
5.
“TIL The cast of FRIENDS each made $1M per episode in the final two seasons and now make $20M per year per cast member for reruns. The show still generates $1B/year for Warner Bros. All thanks to David Schwimmer encouraging the cast to negotiate as a team.”
– imsiq
6.
“TIL Costco’s hot dog has remained $1.50 since it was first introduced in 1984. After the company president complained they were losing money on it, CEO Jim Sinegal put his foot down. “If you raise [the price of] the effing hot dog, I will kill you,” Sinegal said.”
7.
“TIL Microsoft tried a 4-day workweek in Japan as part of a “Work-Life Choice Challenge” by shutting down offices every Friday. Productivity, measured by sales per employee, increased by almost 40% compared to the same period the previous year.”
8.
“TIL that William Whipple, one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, freed his slave after signing it because he believed one cannot simultaneously fight for freedom and hold another person in bondage.”
– NikMarus
9.
“TIL many doctors have stopped calling cancer treatment a “fight” or “battle”. They argue these terms misrepresent how treatment works and if treatments fail, the patient is left with guilt and a false belief they didn’t “fight” hard enough.”
10.
“TIL that everyone in Singapore above the age of 21 is automatically registered as an organ donor. Opting out from this Act will result in you being put at the very bottom of the organ priority list, should you need organ transplantation.”
11.
“TIL “Military Grade” is just a marketing ploy. In the actual military, “military-grade” means “meeting the bare-minimum requirements of durability, while also costing the least.”
12.
“TIL before any details of Pixar’s ‘Soul’ was public, a Black chauffeur told Kemp Powers (the film’s co-writer & co-director) that he knew Pixar was making a Black movie because he had never driven so many Black people to Pixar before.”
13.
“TIL Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has disdain for money and large wealth accumulation. In 2017 he said he didn’t want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values. When Apple went public, Wozniak offered $10 million of his stock to early Apple employees, something Jobs refused to do.”
14.
“TIL that a school principal once made a student who’d gotten into trouble sit in the basement & read the U.S. Constitution as punishment. That student (who committed the Constitution to memory as a result) was Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the first Black Supreme Court justice.”
15.
“TIL in 1980 the FBI formed a fake company and attempted to bribe members of congress. Nearly 25% of those tested accepted the bribe and were convicted”
16.
“TIL that when filming the TV series “The Mandalorian” in 2019, the crew ran out of Stormtrooper costumes, so they reached out to the local branch of a Star Wars fan organization, whose members came to join the filming in their own home-made Stormtrooper costumes”
17.
“TIL a very frugal librarian, the late Robert Morin, left millions of his life savings to the University of New Hampshire where he worked as a librarian, then the University spent $1 million dollars of that money on a scoreboard for a new football stadium.”
– StcStasi
18.
“TIL Frank Sinatra died the night of Seinfeld’s finale and his ambulance made it to the hospital in record time because traffic was so light due to everyone watching the show.”
19.
“TIL That while filming Tokyo Drift, they couldn’t get a permit to film a scene. They filmed it anyway, and the studio hired a fall guy to claim to be the director and spend a night in jail.”
– JDDJS
20.
“TIL United Airlines had assured a blind woman that they would help her off the plane but only after the other passengers had gotten off, before forgetting about her and locking the plane up with her in it after everybody else had left.”
– Tuufan
21.
“Today I Learned Judith Love Cohen, who helped create the Abort-Guidance System which rescued the Apollo 13 astronauts, went to work on the day she was in labor. She took a printout of a problem she was working on to the hospital. She called her boss and said she finished the problem and gave birth to Jack Black”
22.
“TIL Shia LaBeouf came under heavy fire for plagiarizing his directorial debut in 2012. When he publicly apologized to the original artist, Dan Clowes, people discovered that Shia’s apology was itself plagiarized verbatim off a Yahoo Answers post from 2010.”
23.
“TIL that Persian King Agha Mohammad Khan ordered the execution of two servants for being too loud. Since it was a holy day, he postponed their execution by a day and made the servants return to their duties. They murdered the king in his sleep that night.”
24.
“TIL Rome has major struggles with expanding the subway system in the city because diggers keep running into major archaeological finds. The Metro C expansion has been in the works for the past 40 years and has unearthed Hadrian’s Athenaeum, a military complex, and an amphitheater.”
– Geaux
25.
“Today I Learned The ashes of Stephen Hawking were buried between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, in a section of Westminster Abbey known as the “Scientists Corner.” As a final tribute, during the burial, the European Space Agency beamed recordings of Hawking’s voice to the nearest black hole.”
26.
“TIL that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. recruit heavily from the Mormon population because they are usually cheaper to do a security clearance on, they often speak another language from their mission trips and they usually have a low-risk lifestyle.”
27.
“TIL That in 2007, Rockstar Games allowed fans to call a number and rant about what they thought was wrong with America. The best calls were featured on a radio station in “Grand Theft Auto IV”
28.
“TIL a 75-year Harvard study found close relationships are the key to a person’s success. Having someone to lean on keeps brain function high and reduces emotional, and physical, pain. People who feel lonely are more likely to experience health declines earlier in life.”
29.
“TIL in Lord of War starring Nicholas Cage, they bought 3000 real guns for the filming because it was cheaper to buy real guns and resell later than buying props. They also rented 50 tanks which were only available for a short period because the source had to sell them to Libya later”
30.
“Today I Learned the founder of Hyundai was born to an impoverished family of peasants in what is now North Korea. In 1998, he sent 1001 cows to his hometown in North Korea as a repayment 1000 times over for a cow that he stole in the early 1930s to afford his train ticket to Seoul and escape from poverty.”
– soyfox
31.
“TIL why Five Guys gives extra fries at the bottom of the bag. They do it so the guests think they are getting a good deal. However, the extra fries are already factored into the menu price. Founder Jerry Murrell also says it is better for customers to feel that their serving of fries was too large.”
32.
“TIL Gordon Ramsay set up a business inside a London prison that taught inmates how to bake and sold the goods on the outside. Providing the prison with financial support while giving the inmates work experience they could use to find honest work after their sentence.”
33.
“Today I Learned that in “Forrest Gump,” when his microphone is cut off at the rally, what you don’t hear him say is “Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don’t go home at all. That’s a bad thing. That’s all I have to say about that.”
34.
“TIL a guide dog named Roselle led a group of people including her blind owner down 78 flights of stairs before the North Tower collapsed on 9/11. She only stopped to give kisses to a woman who was having a panic attack.”
35.
“Today I Learned that the firm Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees on 9/11. The CEO, who was taking his child to school that day, later distributed $180 million to the families and offered jobs to all children of the victims. 57 of those children were employed by Cantor Fitzgerald as of 2016.”