Throw It In/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • When Neil Armstrong reported landing in simulators during the training for Apollo 11, he always said "Houston, Eagle. We have landed" or some close variation on that. When he actually got to the moon, he realized that something more poetic was necessary for such a historic moment and ad libbed, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed" which no one else had ever heard. The communications officer in Houston was clearly surprised but responded "Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground." The name is now recognized by the International Astronomical Union.
  • Many, many lasting and important inventions were discovered completely by accident. The efficacy of microwaves with regards to heating food was realized when the American engineer Percy Spencer, while working on an active radar set, noticed that a chocolate bar he had on him began to melt.
  • The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is the evidential lynchpin in the big bang theory, was discovered unwittingly by the two American astronomers Penzias and Wilson, who did their darnedest to get rid of the "background noise" their New Jersey-based radio horn was picking up, going so far as to scrub the entire inside of the horn. Their accidental discovery won them the Nobel Prize, and solidified the foundations of the big bang theory.
  • Zappo's Potato Chips invented the "Voodoo" flavor by a guy spilling a few spices. Someone stuck their finger in the resulting mess and declared it delicious.
  • A lot of extensible, free-as-in-freedom software (some call it Open Source), ends up like this. Prominent examples are Emacs and UNIX (though originally it was proprietary; only with the GNU project has the licensing been cleared up and extensibility preserved). Other examples include the LISP programming language (especially in previous versions, where it was localized in certain areas (e.g. MAClisp (no relation to the Macintosh) in the MIT AI lab) --recently, it's manifested in de-facto standard libraries) , probably because of its built-in extensibility (with defmacro)
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