› added 9 years ago

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TIL that “A Scanner Darkly” was the first novel Philip K Dick wrote without the help of amphetamines.

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xVy0b TIL that to the Akan people of Ghana, the second twin to be born is considered the elder, as they were mature enough to help their sibling out first.
ex4g TIL a type of fruit fly has evolved with near perfect images of ants on its wings to deter predators and attract mates
KYll9 TIL the strange case of the famous writer of crime stories Agatha Christie vanishing for 11 days in 1926 at the top of her career, allegedly for loss of memory
5VO5p TIL the historian meridian marker In Greenwich is off by about 100 meters because they looked "straight up" at stars, but to find "straight up" you use a weight to find "straight down", and the uneven mass of the Earth means that it doesn't point to the exact center of the Earth
D1gNg TIL that when told that Captain Picard drank a lot of tea, Patrick Stewart suggested the character should drink lapsang souchong (a variety favored by Winston Churchill). The producers were afraid that audience members wouldn’t know what it was, so they made him change it to Earl Grey.