Nike had conditions before giving rookie Michael Jordan a record contract: Either be rookie of the year, or average 20 ppg, or be an all star, or sell $4 mill worth shoes in a year. Jordan was rookie of the year, scored 28.2 ppg, named all star, and Nike sold $100 mill of shoes in 1984-85.

Shortly after returning from the moon Buzz Aldrin began to suffer from alcoholism and depression. “I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume. There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into."

The final science exam for 8th grade students in Ketchikan Alaska is a 2 night survival trip on an uninhabited island.

Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who began taping whatever was on television in 1979 and didn’t stop until her death in 2012.. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV. They are being digitized by the Internet Archive.

After visiting a prison in Norway that treated prisoners humanely, a warden from North Dakota went back and reformed her prison based on Norway’s model. It later saw sharp decline in violence against inmates and threats against staff

In 1959 a white man from Texas disguised himself as a black man and traveled for six weeks on greyhound buses. After publishing his experiences with racism he was forced to move to Mexico for several years due to death threats.

When Charlie Sheen came out as HIV positive, it led to a 95 percent increase in over the counter HIV home testing kits and 2.75 million searches on the topic, dubbed “The Charlie Sheen Effect.” Some said that Sheen did more for awareness of HIV than most UN events

Schizophrenia’s hallucinations are shaped by culture. Americans with schizophrenia tend to have more paranoid and harsher voices/hallucinations. In India and Africa people with schizophrenia tend to have more playful and positive voices.

Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 was created by only 9 people…. and 8 of them had never once worked on a video game before.

Roller Coaster Tycoon was coded by one person in x86 Assembly language.

The US Military still uses 8 inch floppy disks on outdated IBM computers to run the nuclear missile systems. It’s because they are incredibly hard to hack. The computers are essentially air-gapped and the old IBM computers are reliable. They could run for another 40 years with spare parts.

A woman with a ‘mutant’ gene who feels no pain and heals without scarring was discovered by scientists. She reported numerous injuries without pain, often smelling her burning flesh before noticing any injury, and could open door to new treatments.

George Clooney once gave 14 of his closest friends each $1M in cash, and even paid the taxes on it for them – with one condition: they all had to take it or none of them got it.

In 2005 graffiti artist David Choe was offered $60K to paint multiple murals at Facebook headquarters. He chose to take his compensation in stock which was eventually worth more than $200 million.