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u/ralphbernardo

r/shutdownfullcast r/ShermanPosting r/SiliconValleyHBO r/NotMyJob r/comedybangbang r/PeepShowQuotes r/TheDollop r/HumorInPoorTaste r/alaska r/todayilearned r/politics
TIL a practical joke created a real book: annoyed at how bestseller lists were made, radio host Jean Shepherd urged listeners to ask bookstores for "I, Libertine"—a novel that didn't exist. Fans spread the hoax so widely that Ballantine Books hired Theodore Sturgeon to write it, publishing in 1956.
▲ 1.5k r/todayilearned

TIL a practical joke created a real book: annoyed at how bestseller lists were made, radio host Jean Shepherd urged listeners to ask bookstores for "I, Libertine"—a novel that didn't exist. Fans spread the hoax so widely that Ballantine Books hired Theodore Sturgeon to write it, publishing in 1956.

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 9 hours ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 14.7k r/todayilearned

TIL Thomas Jefferson wrote "our fellow subjects" in his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, then erased "subjects" while the ink was still wet and wrote "citizens" over it. The edit was suspected for decades but only confirmed in 2010 by hyperspectral imaging at the Library of Congress.

loc.gov
u/ralphbernardo — 3 days ago
▲ 1.4k r/alaska+1 crossposts

TIL in response to a potential Soviet invasion of Alaska, the U.S. Air Force and FBI established Operation Washtub, training ordinary Alaskans—bartenders, bush pilots, ministers, trappers—as civilian "stay-behind" agents to spy on Soviet forces. One recruit skipped training, claiming a bear hunt.

adn.com
u/AKStafford — 6 days ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 6.2k r/todayilearned

TIL Akihiko Kondo spent 2 million yen on a formal 2018 wedding to symbolically marry the virtual singer Hatsune Miku—a character he credits with helping him return to work and reconnect with society. When her hologram service shut down in 2020, newspapers dubbed him the "first digital widower."

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 13 days ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 31.7k r/todayilearned

TIL Marvin Pipkin, as a new GE recruit, solved the "impossible" task of making an inside-frosted lightbulb—a job handed to new hires as an induction ritual into the challenges of research—since every previous attempt had failed. Nobody had told him it couldn't be done.

spark.iop.org
u/ralphbernardo — 20 days ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 41.2k r/ShermanPosting+2 crossposts

TIL in 1947, scientists dumped crushed dry ice into a hurricane just to "see what would happen." The storm then made a 135-degree turn, strengthened, and struck Georgia—sparking public outrage and threats of lawsuits over the experiment.

aoml.noaa.gov
u/ElmCityGrad — 23 days ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 25.9k r/SiliconValleyHBO+1 crossposts

TIL Steve Jobs’ design obsession went so deep he demanded Apple computers look perfect on the inside. Inspired by Zen Buddhism and Bauhaus minimalism, he believed in “deep simplicity,” and insisted that even the hidden internal engineering look as polished as the outside.

smithsonianmag.com
u/Warfielf — 25 days ago
▲ 3.2k r/todayilearned

TIL that left-handed people were once considered more prone to crime and degeneracy by 19th-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who asserted that left-handedness was linked to alcoholism and neurodegeneration—a view that shaped negative attitudes toward left-handers well into the 20th century.

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 27 days ago
▲ 1.5k r/todayilearned

TIL that when 18th-century experiments showed metals gain mass when burned—breaking the leading theory of combustion—some chemists refused to abandon it and instead proposed that the substance they believed escaped during burning, "phlogiston," must have negative mass.

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 29 days ago
▲ 3.1k r/todayilearned

TIL that Scottish physician John Brown argued in 1780 that all disease came from too much or too little "excitability"—treating his diagnosed "under-stimulated" patients with opium, roast beef, and alcohol. His "Brunonian system" was highly influential across Italy and Germany for decades.

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 1 month ago
▲ 741 r/todayilearned

TIL in 1937, Herbert Bolton, a UC Berkeley historian, declared genuine a brass plate said to be the marker left by Francis Drake in 1579 to claim California for Queen Elizabeth. It was a practical joke by his own history club, who even printed a book noting the plate's flaws. Bolton wouldn't budge.

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 1 month ago
▲ 251 r/todayilearned

TIL the Perceptron was unveiled in 1958 as the genesis of a machine the U.S. Navy expected to "walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence." Invented by Frank Rosenblatt, this learning machine was designed to predict whether an image belonged in one of two categories.

theconversation.com
u/ralphbernardo — 1 month ago
▲ 1.6k r/todayilearned

TIL that Britain attacked Germany with nearly 100,000 balloons in "Operation Outward" during World War II—some dangling wires to short out power lines, others dropping incendiaries to start fires. The damage to Germany far outweighed the cost; one balloon helped destroy a power station near Leipzig.

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 1 month ago
▲ 1.5k r/todayilearned

TIL that on August 13, 1967, two women were killed by grizzly bears in separate attacks just hours apart in Glacier National Park—the first fatal grizzly maulings in the park's 57-year history. The "Night of the Grizzlies" led directly to modern bear management policy in U.S. national parks.

en.wikipedia.org
u/ralphbernardo — 1 month ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 29.6k r/comedybangbang+2 crossposts

TIL Werner Herzog convinced Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni to keep Grogu as a puppet instead of CGI on the set of "The Mandalorian." After watching them shoot a take without the puppet to allow a CGI replacement in post-production, Herzog told them, "You are cowards. Leave it."

slashfilm.com
u/ItsFal — 2 months ago
▲ 1.9k r/todayilearned

TIL NASA astronauts Pete Conrad and Joe Kerwin were thrown off Skylab in 1973 when a jammed solar array suddenly deployed. Only their spacesuit tethers kept them from floating out into space. This incident happened during the first-ever repair spacewalk, which saved America's first space station.

nasa.gov
u/ralphbernardo — 2 months ago