1Gabe Newell
After 3 years at Harvard, American computer programmer Gabe Newell dropped out to join Microsoft in 1983. He later said: "I learned more in 3 months at Microsoft than in my entire time at Harvard."
2. Luz Long was a German competitor against Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Owens was later quoted saying “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty-four karat friendship that I felt for Luz Long.” Owens was the best man at his son’s wedding.
3. Keanu Reeve’s first name Keanu is Hawaiian, Ke’Anu meaning “Cool breeze over the mountains, but almost went with Chuck Spadina as his stage name when starting out in Hollywood at his agent's request.
4. Because regular air is toxic at high pressures, deep sea divers live on a mix of helium and oxygen, meaning they live and speak with a squeaky helium voice for around a month while working.
5. Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff wrote a novel, City of Thieves, about 2 people surviving the Nazi onslaught in Russia. This novel was later the "major artistic inspiration" for the hit video game The Last of Us.
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6Rolling Jubilee
Rolling Jubilee is a Strike Debt project that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it.
7. Parasocial Relationships are one-sided relationships, where one person pours emotions and effort into the relationship and the other doesn't know the first exists.
8. Scientists used Sunflowers near Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear accident, to extract radioactive cesium from contaminated ponds nearby. This process was again used in 2011 at Fukushima to extract radiation from the nearby communities.
9. Elvis Presley was a huge Monty Python fan. He would watch Python all night. He would learn and recite them. Took the tapes on his plane. He would call people Squire from the "Nudge Nudge" sketch.
10. Rapper Coolio's cameo in Batman & Robin was an Easter Egg setting up the fifth movie in the series. Coolio is uncredited as playing Dr. Jonathan Crane aka The Scarecrow who would've been the main villain in Batman Unchained.
11Anti-aircraft gun
A Texas plumber's truck was traded to a dealership in 2013. The dealership then auctioned and shipped to Turkey with his business' decals still on it. The truck eventually ended up in Syria, where it was outfitted with an anti-aircraft gun and used in the country’s civil war.
12. Stanley Kubrick recorded a typist hammering out “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” because he believed each typewriter key made a slightly different sound and he wanted the audio track of “The Shining” to be perfectly accurate.
13. When the husband of Cassandra Harris (Lisl in For Your Eyes Only) visited the set one day, producer Cubby Broccoli took such a liking to him that he thought he would be a perfect choice to play James Bond. That man was Pierce Brosnan, who made his Bond debut over a decade later.
14. Archeologists are using LiDAR to survey the South American rainforests. The results have helped reveal over 60,000 previously undiscovered ruins, part of a much greater civilization than previously thought.
15. When the very famous mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (creator of the modern Pierrot) was accused of murder in 1836, hundreds of Parisians came to the courthouse, not for the trial itself but just to finally hear the voice of the mime.
16Kerry Von Erich
A professional wrestler named Kerry Von Erich had to have his foot amputated after a bad accident but continued wrestling while secretly wearing a prosthetic - even showering in his boots so no one would know. His injury wasn't public knowledge until his death from suicide 7 years later.
17. Your body odors changes when you’ve been successfully infected by Plasmodium (Malaria), thereby making you a better target for mosquitos and spreading the disease.
18. James Watt calculated the horsepower by measuring the output of an actual horse in order to quantify how many horses his steam engines could replace.
19. Japan's most celebrated generals have been masters of Ikebana, the art of flower arranging, finding that it calmed their minds and helped them make clear decisions in the field of battle.
20. Angelo Poffo, the father of Macho Man Randy Savage, destroyed the World Record for consecutive sit-ups with 6,033 in 4 hours and 10 minutes. This record is still unbroken.
21Stephen Foster
In 1855, Stephen Foster, the mayor of Los Angeles, convinced a mob to not kill an accused murderer, but to try him in a court of law. When the accused man was acquitted, the mayor resigned and led a lynch mob to kill the man. He was re-elected a year later.
22. The FBI has an entire fake town named Hogan's Alley for training agents. Hogan's Alley has a bank, post office, hotel, laundromat, barber shop, pool hall, shops, and homes. The town is populated by actors who roleplay parts like bystanders, terrorists, bank robbers, and drug dealers so scenarios always change.
23. Abraham Lincoln repeatedly warned that British recognition of the Confederacy was tantamount to a declaration of war. Knowing a war would cut off vital shipments of American food, wreak havoc on the British merchant fleet, and cause the immediate loss of Canada, Britain was unwilling to risk a conflict.
24. Nearly the entire world uses one of 2 forms to say tea, basically derived from the Chinese words 'te' (ie Spanish and English) and 'cha' (ie Hindi and Russian), because of the way tea spread around the world from China. 'Cha' is used in places where tea came by land and 'te' where it was imported over water.
25. There are fake towns and roads (known as "paper towns") that mapmakers put in their maps so that if someone makes a map which has one of these paper towns, they could know it's a copy.
