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TIL the Dead Rabbits riot was originally a small-scale street fight between members of the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys into a citywide gang war, which occurred July 4–5, 1857.

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GYxDQ TIL about the Werther-Effect, the emulation of another suicide that the person attempting suicide knows about either from local knowledge or due to accounts or depictions of the original suicide. Due to this, in Australia it's illegal for media to report suicide as a reason a person has passed.
wox86 TIL that in 1965, philosophy professor Hubert Dreyfus, a staunch critic of artificial intelligence, boldly claimed that a machine would never beat a human at the game of chess. It would only be two years before the outspoken scholar was himself checkmated by an MIT-developed computer.
Mowa TIL: The Murphy bed is named after William L Murphy who needed a way to hide his bed in order to have a girl over to his one bedroom apartment b/c of the moral codes of the times.
aw5Q9 TIL Lafayette, the French officer who aided the U.S. Revolutionary War, gifted a pair of pistols to Washington in 1778. Eventually, they came into Andrew Jackson's possession, and Lafayette identified them while visiting Jackson in 1825. In his will, Jackson bequeathed them back to Lafayette's son.
l7ZNK TIL scientists named a bacteria after the famous Welsh town with the 58-letter name; Myxococcus llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis, it's considered the longest name in the binomial nomenclature system, bearing 73 letters in total.