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TIL the Hollywood sign used to say Hollywoodland
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history.com
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reddit.com
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TIL of Harvard Observatory astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt; given the boring job of examining the luminosity of stars in thousands of photos, she discovered how to measure the distance between the Earth and faraway galaxies. At the time, she was not allowed to operate Harvard’s telescope.
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TIL that the S.S. Minnow, the castaway’s ship in the Gilligan’s Island TV show, was named after FCC chairman Newton Minow, who called television a “vast wasteland.”
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TIL that much of our understanding of early language development is derived from the case of an American girl (pseudonym Genie), a so-called feral child who was kept in nearly complete silence by her abusive father, developing no language before her release at age 13.
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TIL in 2009 Burger King ran the "Whopper sacrifice" campaign, which gave a free whopper to anyone who deleted 10 friends on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was alerting people letting them know they'd been dropped for a sandwich
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TIL Canadians say “sorry” so much that in 2009 the apology act was put in place stating that the word “sorry” is no longer an admission of guilt.