› added 5 years ago

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TIL Japanese women are required by the Maternal Child Health Act to register their pregnancies with the local government, and encouraged to be vigilant by utilizing the Maternal and Child Health Handbook distributed upon registration. Over 90% of pregnancies are registered by the 20th week.

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8eWmb TIL that the first person to ever be "banned" from the internet was a lawyer named Laurence Canter in 1994. He sent the first massive commercial spam email (advertising green card services). The backlash was so big that his ISP received so many complaints it crashed their servers.
epDkJ TIL that Hermione was based on J.K. Rowling: the author loosely based the character on herself when she was 11 years old, and chose an otter as Hermione's patronus as it's her favourite animal. She also took the name from Shakespeare's The Winter’s Tale and didn't want a popular name
6prQ TIL Isaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in 9 of 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification. He is the 17th most-translated author, just behind Arthur Conan Doyle and ahead of Pope John Paul II
VMnjk TIL that by 400 BC, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert
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