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TIL The original Super Mario Bros game had 256 “Hidden” levels that were only accessible by swapping the game cartridge with a copy of “Tennis” while the game was running.

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KOO7Q Imagine yourself at a concert hall looking at a symphonic orchestra on stage. Have you ever noticed that high-pitched strings sit left of low-pitched strings? Going from left to right, one usually sees violins, violas, cellos and double basses. That is, one moves from high pitches on the left to low pitches on the right. Why? The orchestra’s arrangement is not a cultural oddity, like driving on the right side of the road. Rather, it is due to our own biological makeup. Higher pitches tend to be better processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while lower pitches tend to be better processed by a similar region in the right hemisphere. This organisation is thought to have repercussions far beyond music, perhaps even helping to explain why language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. So the part of my brain that better processes high sounds sits where the higher-pitched instruments sit: on the left. But that’s not the end of the story.
rRmKo TIL that Gail Halvorsen, a US pilot, would drop candies for German children in late 1940s Berlin. To not injure them, he would fabricate parachutes out of handkerchiefs and tied them to the rations.
p8pMG TIL the four-term Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, famous for his hard-line segregationist views and his four presidential campaigns, renounced his past racial views and ran for his final term in 1982, winning with over 90% of the Black vote.
jNQ8N TIL that one of the findings of the Kinsey Scale study was that men trended towards homosexuality more so than women, contrary to the perception that women were more homosexually inclined. Kinsey speculated that this perception was a product of "wishful thinking" on the part of heterosexual men.
yQBP8 TIL: Radio commentator Paul Harvey’s father was murdered in Tulsa when Paul was a boy.