51 Greatest Examples Of “I’ll Do It Myself” In History

25 Sep 2024, 06:24 by Oleksandra Kyryliuk, Gabija Palšytė · Bored Panda

We’ve all been there—trying to get something done while everyone else just won’t listen. It’s beyond frustrating, and sometimes, you just hit that breaking point where you think, “Enough is enough, I’ll handle it myself!”

Redditors came together to share their favorite iconic moments when people took charge and made things happen. Scroll down to read these incredible stories and don’t forget to upvote your favorites!

This post may include affiliate links.

This is very personal for me but my Grandpa (who raised me with my Grandma) retired as an engineer, was bored and saw a need for what back then was called mobility equipment. He invented the standing frame in the 1980s. It allowed people with spinal issues (eg quadriplegia) to be transitioned from lying down to vertically standing up - fully supported and safe - without them leaving their bed. He made quite a few variations for different sizes and ages and they sold all over the world. He simply said “no one else was helping, so I did”. All from our suburban garage in Sydney Australia. He was awarded an Order of Australia, one of our country’s highest honours. He was my hero.Octonaughty , TOMMY CHAN

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In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger, an undertaker, noticed he was losing a lot of business to the other undertaker in town. He found out that the other undertaker’s wife was a telephone operator and when she intercepted people asking to be connected to Strowger’s funeral home, the operator would route the call to her husband’s funeral home instead.

Three years later, Strowger patented the automatic teller exchange, a system which allowed telephone users to make calls without the need for human operators, single-handedly destroying an entire workforce.Hostificus , Thatbrock

My vote goes to Dashrath Manjhi. When his wife died in 1959 after being injured from falling from a mountain and due to the same mountain blocking easy access to a nearby hospital in time, he decided to carve a 110-metre-long (360 ft), 9.1-metre-wide (30 ft), and 7.7-metre-deep (25 ft) path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel.RowlData , wikipedia.org

Maybe not in history, but in my own life it’s an example that still makes me smile.

I’m disabled (wear a leg brace on my right leg and use elbow crutches). In second grade we were playing Capture the Flag, and somehow I’d gotten to the circle where the flag was on the opposing side. No one bothered to guard me, or even watch the flag. I stuffed the flag in my pocket and scooted as fast as I could past the line to safety. A few seconds later confusion erupted. All eyes on me, I slowly pulled the long red piece of fabric out of my pocket with the flourish of a magician pulling out a silk handkerchief. My entire team erupted in cheers. I was the hero of the day.
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You know that old wives tale about how cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis? Well, Doctor Donald Unger decided to test that theory in the most extreme way he could. Once a day for 50 years, he cracked the knuckles in his left hand but not in his right hand. Neither hand developed arthritis, thus disproving the old wives tale.

50 f***ing years, people. The dedication is just *chef's kiss*.KevMenc1998 , Eren Li

It’s not exactly a ‘f**k it I’ll do it myself’ but a professor called Richard Scoylver along with his research partner Georgina Long had developed breakthrough melanoma research and treatments. Last year Scoyler was diagnosed with a type of grade 4 brain cancer that was incurable. So him and his partner developed a new experimental treatment, with Scoyler being the first patient to receive it. A year later Scolyver appears completely cured with no sign recurrence of the brain tumour.Wichella , profrscolyer

Barry Marshall. He thought the ulcers were caused by bacteria, but couldn’t get ethics approval for human testing. So he drank H. pylori bacteria himself, and developed ulcers 3 days later which confirmed his theory.sunbearimon , Yutaka Tsutsumi

Can only remember a moment in personal history. I was the last generation in my country to do mandatory military service. And apparently my generation is particularly lazy.

We were supposed to pass some sort of exercise parcours and had a time that we were supposed to do it in. Almost nobody could do it, and everyone complained that it's some sort of elite target that obviously can't be reached.

We were stunned when the officer, chubby guy in his 50s, flew through that entire thing with a mixture of rage and disappointment in our performance, easily a minute faster than any of us did. Didn't say a word after that, neither did we.

Nobody ever questioned the guy again. If he said it's possible, it WAS possible after that demonstration.Ratiofarming , Specna Arms

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Léo Major.

During the summer of 1944, while he was out on a solo reconnaissance mission, he spotted two German soldiers nearby. Without hesitation, he killed one and captured the other. Then he went after their commanding officer and a whole German garrison, taking down a few more soldiers along the way. Even when under fire from other Germans, he just kept walking and, on his own, managed to capture 93 German soldiers. ON HIS OWN.

In 1945, Leo was in hit a landmine while in a truck, breaking his back, ribs, and both ankles. They told him he'd be discharged. Leo didn’t care. So he snuck out of the field hospital, stayed with a Dutch family until he recovered, and then made his way back to his battalion. He volunteered to scout out the city of Zwolle and, once he set off, decided he’d just take the city himself.

He convinced a German soldier to deliver a message to the German forces, and then spent the night causing havoc around the city. He fired shots, threw grenades, captured soldiers, and cleared out the SS building. His strategy worked so well that the Germans thought the entire Canadian army was invading, BUT IT WAS ONLY F*****G LEO. By morning, the town was empty of Germans, and the Canadian army strolled right in. It literally took him one night.

Fun fact: he also had an eyepatch. He lost his eye earlier because of a grenade. But decided he could still be a sniper.Adventurous_Book3023 , wikipedia.org

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I don't know if this fits, but I feel like it deserves an honorabl mention. Theresa Kachindamoto, the paramount chief of the Dedza District in Malawi:

She is renowned for her courageous efforts to eradicate child marriage in her community. Since taking office, she has dissolved over 3,500 child marriages, sending each of those children back to school.

Kachindamoto’s forceful action in dissolving child marriages and insisting on education for both girls and boys has been met with both praise and criticism. **Despite receiving death threats and backlash** from some community members, she has remained committed to her cause. She is now lobbying the government to increase the marriageable age to 21.

In a country with one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, Kachindamoto’s efforts have made a significant difference. According to reports, she has stopped around 850 child marriages in just three years, and over 300 in a single month. Her work has inspired a community-wide shift towards prioritizing education and protecting children’s rights.
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Maybe not the "greatest" but George Lucas wanted to make a Flash Gordan Movie. They wouldn't give him the rights so he wrote is own space opera, created his own special effects company and basically became a multi billionaire by making the biggest money making movie franchise there ever was. (at least for a while).Doright36 , Harrison Jeffs

Ol’ mate that removed his own appendix in Antarctica
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/antarctica-1961-a-soviet-surgeon-has-to-remove-his-own-appendix/72445/

Or the Aussie nurse who was working out bush and treated his own STEMI
https://www.iflscience.com/in-remote-western-australia-a-nurse-selftreated-a-heart-attack-46529.Janedoe_21 , Muhammad Khawar Nazir

Girolamo Cardano was a mathematician in the Renaissance who was trying to find a generalized solution for the roots of cubic functions. One of the problems that kept popping up was he needed to take the square root of negative numbers, something traditional “real number” algebra wouldn’t allow. Cardano, instead of writing it off as impossible, simply decided that these “imaginary numbers” (as they were called later) must exist, an astoundingly controversial opinion at the time.

Now we use them every day.VixinXiviir , gingkoedizioni.it

Napoleon. Dude busted out of prison and got the army that was against him on his side.AmericanPanascope , Jacques-Louis David

My vote is Alex Zanardi. Former Formula One and CART racer, back in 2001 he'd returned to CART and got in an accident that caused another car to sheer the nose of his off. If you're unfamiliar with the bodyplan of this kind of car that doesn't sound like much, but these are those low, open wheel vehicles and the nose *has the driver's legs in it*. So he suffered traumatic amputation of both legs, one at and one above his knee, and they had to chop more off to clean up and close the wounds, lost 3/4ths of his blood volume, and woke up after the crash a double amputee.

Now, most people would go, "Wow, I am lucky to be alive after such a crash, I should probably take it easy and make the most of the rest of my life and stay the f**k away from cars after one tore my legs off." But Alex Zanardi is not most people. As soon as he was healed and fitted with prosthetics, he started trying to drive again, and found all the prosthetics to him to just be *insufficient* for driving with, and ended up learning about and designing his own prosthetics, to his own standards, to facilitate getting himself *back behind the wheel of a car and on a track again*.

He was able to get back in a CART to ceremonially finish the race he was nearly killed in in 2003, and moved on to racing again in Touring series later in 2003, and has been racing in various ways up until recently. This includes continuing with handcycling, which he picked up in 2001 while recovering from the amputations, and even competed in the paralympics and winning multiple gold and silver medals, marathons, and setting records in the process. Unfortunately, in 2020 he suffered a second serious racing accident while handcycling during a road race where he lost control and went face first into an oncoming truck.

And lived. Again. As of 2022 he's back home and continuing to recover, and no word on if he'll take his third lease on life to continue racing once recovered.

Incredible man.

On a non-racing note: The man has the weirdest luck, because in the middle of 2022 he got hospitalized *again* from a house fire, and lived, again(I can't easily find if he was actually injured in the fire, the hospitalization is listed as being because the fire damaged equipment he needs to live, so it may just have been the only place that had the stuff he needed, and he wasn't any further hurt). Something really has it out for him and something else will not let him die.Uturuncu , Race Day Replay

Tony Iommi. Lost the tips of his ring and middle fingers on his right hand in a sheet metal accident at age 17. Told he’d likely never play guitar again, as he was left handed and injured his fretboard hand, Tommy fashioned his own homemade thimbles and learned to play again.

Not having full sensation in his fingers, he found it difficult to play so he tuned his guitar down to loosen the strings, effectively creating the heavy metal sound Black Sabbath would eventually become famous for.geisterpunk , Carl Lender

In 1940 Polish army officer and Polish resistance soldier Witold Pilecki volunteered to be captured by the German occupier and be placed in Auschwitz concentration camp in order to infiltrate it. He successfully organized a resistance movement inside, collected a lot of intel on Nazi atrocities, and escaped it in 1943. In 1944 he fought in the Warsaw Uprising.

He didn't accept the Soviet occupation of Poland and remained loyal to the Polish government-in-exile (based in London). He returned to Poland after the war in 1945 to report on the situation there. Sadly, he was arrested in 1947 by Communist Poland's secret police, tortured and executed in 1948.
JarasM
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Linus Torvalds is really an interesting person. After creating Linux, the system running on most servers today, he also made Git purely motivated by dissatisfaction with the then available versioning programs. And it became not only the versioning tool for Linux developers (his goal), but also the most popular versioning tool being used by software companies and developers today.
l86rj
The group of elderly people who tunneled under the Berlin Wall because they got told to f**k off.

I recall this exhibit from the Checkpoint Charlie museum about 20 years ago. There was a group of elderly Germans who lived on the east side of the wall, and quite near it. They sought help from someone who ran escape routes to the west and did a lot of tunneling. He basically told them “nah, you’re too old and useless to help me.”

They were not having it.

They set out to make their own tunnel. They devised their own system of signals and codes with the planting of flowers. Each person had a role, from digging to dirt dispersal to manning the planting signals. And the best part is that they made their tunnel tall enough so they could all walk through instead of having to crawl as would have been the case with the other guy’s tunnel.
HonoriaG
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In the early 60s, Ford was interested in purchasing Ferrari, and poured a LOT of money towards investingating their finances, their facilities, etc. Enzo Ferrari played along, but ultimately didn't really plan on actually selling to Ford, instead using the fact that Ford was interested in order to negotiate a favorable deal when he eventually sold to Fiat, a deal which allowed him to maintain control over the racing division of Ferrari.

To say that Ford was pissed about having the rug pulled out from under them would be the understatement of the century. They figured out the only thing they could do that was guaranteed to p**s off Enzo would be to go after his pride and joy, Ferrari's winning streak at Le Mans, and so they set out to do exactly that. They poured tons of money and resources into making a car that would accomplish exactly that, which ended up being the Ford GT-40.

Another major Enzo Ferrari blunder was Lamborghini's sports car division. Lamborghini was making tractors, and was pretty successful at that. Ferrucio Lamborghini owned a Ferrari sports car, and had issues with the clutch, and as he had some mechanical experience, he figured out the issue and reached out to Enzo with some suggestions on how it could be fixed, only to be met with contempt. Ferrucio was pissed off, and promptly decided he'd build a better sports car than Ferrari ever could, resulting in the Miura, which laid the foundations for Lamborghini to continue making sports cars.Turquoise_Teletubbie , Georg Eiermann

Leo Major liberates Zwolle by himself out of sheer rage and spite. Went to scout out German #s and said f**k it, I'm doing this solo. 1 man vs about 200-300 Germans.SiriHowDoIAdult , Jmajor

Sony going into gaming industry after failed partnership with Nintendo on CD add-on. The rest is the history of one of the best selling home video game consoles - PlayStation. .SubstantialBasket709 , EVG Kowalievska

"I have bought some of the most famous gran turismo cars," he would later say, "and in each of these magnificent machines I have found some faults. Too hot, or uncomfortable, or not sufficiently fast, or not perfectly finished. Now I want to make a GT car without faults … a perfect car."

In 1963, Ferruccio founded Automobili Lamborghini, employing a talented team that included Giampaolo Dallara, Paolo Stanzani, and New Zealander Bob Wallace, with Giotto Bizzarrini as a consultant. Lamborghini built his factory on farmland in Sant'Agata Bolognese, an easy commute for the skilled workers employed by Ferrari and Maserati in nearby Modena.gau-tam , wikipedia.org

The Wright brothers. Let go they actually set out to build a working heavier-than-air flying machine themselves and never expected anyone else to do it for them, they originally believed they could rely on other people's knowledge and research for multiple things, such as airfoils, propellers and engines. They soon found out they couldn't.

So they built their own wind tunnel to research airfoils, and later propellers so they could build wings that could generate lift, and propellers that would effectively propel the aircraft forward. After finding out nobody had ever considered building a lightweight engine, they figured out how to build one themselves.

They even developed a warping trailing edge for their wings to control the roll movement of the aircraft, though similar functionality (now universally known as aileron) had been invented by others before them. Still they appear to be the first to seriously consider the need for 3-axis control for aircraft.

Then they flew their own contraption, which may have been necessary because it was so complicated to keep in the air one had to know it pretty intimately to have any kind of hope to keep it flying even for 12 seconds. And nobody had considered organized training of pilots yet, so shortly after the Wright brothers established a flight school also.internet_commie , Cole & Co

After the mutiny on the Bounty, captain Bligh was set in a rowboat at sea off of Madagascar, with a jug of water and some hardtack biscuits.

The bastage rowed himself back to England to bring the mutineers up on charges.

ETA: read down for correct deets.pasdedeuxchump , Alexander Huey

While not world changing, me. My wife had cancer and was going in and out of the hospital for months because of a life-threatening infection. There were a lot of things that I didn't like about her care. She finally got better but her doctors said that she was going to be having GI problems and probably cancers for the rest of her life. I wanted her to have better care than she had gotten up to that point so I quit being an engineer, went back to school, and became a Registered Nurse.

Then, a few years later, she cheated on me with a guy she worked with who would post on Facebook about how there were dinosaurs on Noah's ark.stupididiot78 , Andrea Piacquadio

After the death of her husband, Pharaoh Thutmose II, Egypt was supposed to be ruled by her stepson, Thutmose III. However, he was still a child, and Hatshepsut was meant to act as regent until he came of age. "F it" Moment*: Instead of merely serving as regent, Hatshepsut declared herself Pharaoh—one of the very few women to do so in ancient Egypt. She ruled for over 20 years, expanded Egypt’s trade networks, commissioned grand architectural projects like her famous temple at Deir el-Bahri, and established a period of peace and prosperity.Comprehensive-Cut330 , kevinofsydney

Well he probably didn't say "f**k it," but Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian priest/astronomer who basically came up with what is now known as the "Big Bang Theory." He was at the famous (at least for physicists) 1927 Solvay conference, and while he was still fresh off getting his PhD, he managed to get to talk to Einstein about his idea of an expanding universe that started with a singularity.

He was this young upstart kid among some of the greatest minds of the age (Marie Curie, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac) and Einstein was dismissive of his notion, saying “from the point of view of Physics this seems to me abominable”.

Lemaitre was right, of course, and years later Einstein had to admit that he was wrong.
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When NASA ignored Katherine Johnson's calculations, so she rechecked all the math herself, ensuring John Glenn's space flight was a success. Absolute legend.MistralRomina , Katherine Johnson

In 1981, in the west of Ireland, a local priest decided that his town needed an airport. So he built one. With no money and no planning permission. It's now the West of Ireland's international airport https://www.rte.ie/archives/2016/0215/768106-knock-airport/.
DD_irl_irl

John Brown tried to end slavery with an army mostly made up of his immediate family members.martinsonsean1 , Augustus Washington

General Pikalov in the HBO Chernobyl series, when he drove the lead shielded truck mounted with a high-range dosimeter to obtain an accurate reading of the radiation levels.

Clad even lived till 2003.AdRepresentative8723 , HBO

MSG Roy Benavidez. In Vietnam, he was a US Army Special Forces soldier, and one day in 1968 he heard over the radio that a patrol of 12 Special Forces and 9 Montagnard soldiers were surrounded by a NVA battalion. Benavidez jumped on a helicopter, armed only with a knife, to go help his comrades. Long story short, he ended up saving 8 of them (in a very similar way to Forrest Gump), killed several NVA soldiers, and took all manner of injuries and wounds from the enemy. In the end he had 37 separate bullet, bayonet and shrapnel wounds and lost consciousness on the way back to base. Mistaken for being dead, he was placed in a body bag, but as it was being zipped up by the doctor managed to spit in the doctor's face to prove he was alive.

In 1981 President Reagan presented MSG Roy Benavidez with the Medal of Honor and said "If the story of his heroism were a movie script, you would not believe it." After all that it was respiratory complications stemming from diabetes that proved to be the only thing that could kill Benavidez when he died at the age of 63 in 1998.DigitalEagleDriver , wikipedia.org

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Horacio Pagani while working at Lamborghini suggested that they should buy an autoclave because it would allow them to produce professional lightweight carbon car bodies, Lamborghini refused, so Horacio left Lamborghini, took a bank loan and bought the machine himself. He started making the bodies himself and selling them to other automakers, including Lamborghini. After some time in 1992, Horacio Pagani founded Pagani Automobili and began designing and producing his own cars.
Skoopy859
I know she isn't famous but my 77 year old mum driving herself to hospital in March with bacterial pneumonia and Covid pneumonia at the same time because she couldn't talk to call anyone in the family or the ambulance is a pretty good "Fk it, I will do it myself. The first 2 days in hospital. the doctors and nurses didn't know whether she would survive.*

Oh, you wanted a famous one? The Antarctic scientist doctor who operated on himself for appendicitis because there was no time to get a rescue operation done and he was the only doctor in the whole station. That was pretty awesome.

EDIT: *she did, I stayed with her most of July and August this year.
Adventurous_Bag9122
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I can't remember her name, but I read about a woman who wanted to start her own online college, but couldn't get accreditation from any recognised body in the US. So she then went about founding her own accrediting body, which she did successfully, and naturally the first institution it awarded accreditation to was her online college.063464619 , Ivan Samkov

Mariya Oktyabrskaya.

After her husband was killed fighting Nazis in 1941, Oktyabrskaya sold her possessions to donate a tank for the war effort, and requested that she be allowed to drive it. She received and was trained to drive and fix a T-34 medium tank, which she named "Fighting Girlfriend" ("Боевая подруга"). Oktyabrskaya proved her ability and bravery in battle, and was promoted to the rank of sergeant. After she died of wounds from battle in 1944, she was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's highest honor for bravery during combat. She was the first female tank driver to be awarded the title.
IAmAQuantumMechanic
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Well, I got tired of waiting on contractors to give me a bid on building my house. It was either super expensive or a year out, so I said, "f*** it, I'll do it myself."

And I did.
tenderbuck
Leonid Rogozov diagnosed himself with an acute appendicitis while on an expedition in Antarctica in 1961. Being the only doctor on the f*****g continent he performed an appendicectomy on himself.
That is to say he cut open his own stomach, took out his intestines, removed the inflamed appendix, put the rest of his intestines back, sutured himself and went about his day like a boss.
jamajikhan
That time when this guy’s son was born with adrenoleukodystrophy, an incurable and awful disease. All of the doctors him and his wife spoke to said he was going to live a short and awful life. So they studied neuro chemistry and developed their own treatment and started to modestly fund research.

Their treatment was effective at dramatically slowing the progression of the disease, but unfortunately, their son was pretty far along by the time they worked it out.

[Here’s a bit about them.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto,_Michaela,_and_Lorenzo_Odone).
via-con-dios-kemosab
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One of the biggest “f*** it, I’ll do it myself moments was Magellan deciding to sail around the world. After Portugal shut him down, he went to Spain, got support, and his crew became the first to circumnavigate the globe. Even though he didn’t make it, they proved the Earth was round and opened up global trade routes.
Fragrant-Grab-4448

Lamborghini. The company originally made tractors. The owner bought a Ferrari and was unhappy with it. He went to Ferrari with his concerns and was dismissed, so he made his own.rw890 , Styves Exantus

Charles Guth got mad at Coca-Cola for not giving him discounts on syrup, so he bought Pepsi. Pepsi went from bankrupt to millions in sales in the 30s because of him. He was not a good person, but really knew how to deliver a good "f**k you." I also love Pepsi.spagyeti_monster , Martin Péchy

When Stan Lee created Spider-Man after being told no one would care about a teenage superhero with "personal problems." Now Spidey’s swinging all over pop culture!Aadhan-Charm , Fubree

Pedro Cerrano.

“F**k you Jobu, I do it myself”. And he hit a home run, carrying his bat with him around the bases to send the Cleveland Indians to the playoffs. 1988(?) season, one of the greatest pennant runs in history.
throwgotta
Dashrath Manjhi, the “Mountain Man,” was a laborer from a village in Bihar, who undertook an extraordinary journey to carve a path through a treacherous mountain after his wife’s tragic death in 1959. Falguni Devi died due to the inefficiency of government services; the nearest clinic was 70 kilometers away, and she could not receive timely medical attention after falling while bringing him lunch. Frustrated by the lack of action from authorities, who ignored the community’s needs, Manjhi decided to take matters into his own hands. Over 22 years, using only basic tools, he single-handedly created a 360-foot-long road that reduced travel distance for villagers significantly. Despite facing ridicule and threats from local officials, his determination inspired others to join him. In 1982, he completed the path, which ultimately benefited not just his village but also surrounding areas.
mokaushik
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U.S. Army Colonel Lewis Millet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Millett

That crazy m***********s entire career was one long string of Plot Armor stories! He led so many bayonet charges in Korea that he had to be given a direct order to **stop** even though every one of them was a huge success. Drove away an on fire truck full of ammo to save his unit. And he technically earned the Medal of Honor more than once!

Here’s a more humorous summary of his life if you’re interested:

https://youtu.be/-aivkapXU14.
Rose-Red-Witch
My friend. A Realtor with genius level intellect while in her first year in university. She had a client that wanted to see a unit in a building. My friend called the front desk which was also building management dozens of times before anyone answered. The woman who answered the phone was very nasty and bad at her job.

My friends boyfriend was a software engineer. So my friend and her boyfriend spent a few days working on an automated system that fully replaced the unprofessional woman. She reached out to the building owner, pitched the system, woman was fired immediately, my friend gained access to the unit.
Kingsta8
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Sir Isaac Newton thought bisecting polygons with insanely high numbers of sides (e.g. 2^62 sides) was inefficient at calculating pi, so he used his (and Leibniz's) newly invented calculus to drastically increase the efficiency of calculating pi to an arbitrary number of decimal places.
hardyhaha_27
Greg Jennings putting da team on his back with a broken leg.
GoOnBud
China building their own space station after being rejected by USA from cooperation in International Space Station.
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