› added 11 years ago

63

TIL Congress passed the ‘No Fear Act’ in May 2002 ( “Notification and Federal Employee Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act) providing Whistleblower protection.

Read more darpa.mil

via reddit.com

KO4rR TIL Kuru is found among people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual. This practice stopped in 1960, but cases of kuru were reported for many years afterward because the disease has a long incubation period
xmyB TIL an MIT professor found such a strong correlation between essay length and SAT score that “if you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time.”
GAwMQ TIL about the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed uprising in American history since the Civil War and a resounding example of how far the ruling elite will go to quell any attempt to challenge their hegemony, including calling upon the U.S. Army.
8dEa TIL that gay marriage is not legal in Germany, and gay couples are not allowed to adopt a child together.
4V8X TIL that James Cameron received the go ahead for the film “Aliens” because of his pitch to the producers for the movie, in which he simply walked into the room, wrote “ALIEN” on a blackboard, wrote an “S” after the word, and then drew 2 vertical lines through the S to make it a dollar sign