› added 11 years ago

101

TIL that the French mathematician, Abraham de Moivre, predicted the date of his own death by noticing he slept an extra 15 minutes each day.

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VMndD TIL about "False uniqueness bias," which refers to people underestimating the number of others who share their positive traits ("unlike most people, I exercise") and overestimating the number of people who share their negative traits ("everybody smokes").
XEX1R TIL the longest poem in the world is the Mahābhārata, a Hindu text. It's literally 5 times the length of the bible and the Iliad and the odyssey combined! It has 220000 verses and about 1.8 million words
AD61B TIL there is no such thing as "South Detroit". "South Detroit would be Windsor, ON, Canada.
4X7rw TIL while Alfred Hitchcock was beginning production on The Birds in August 1961, coincidentally, the California seaside town of Capitola was struck by thousands of crazed seabirds
jxgQ TIL in 1978, a landing gear indicator light malfunctioned on a passenger jet approaching Portland, OR. In a holding pattern, the crew spent over an hour inspecting the issue until the jet ran out of fuel and crashed, killing 10 people. The landing gear had actually been down all along.