› added 6 years ago

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TIL sociologist David Dunning once wrote: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is." He described this phenomenon as the "the anosognosia of everyday life."

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M7NOm TIL that before modern digital cameras that record images as digital files, there were still video cameras using the same technology as VHS camcorders that took photos formatted as single NTSC/PAL video frames on floppy disks
v15Wj TIL that Edward Jenner discovered vacination by injecting puss from a milkmaid's cowpox sore into an eight-year-old boy and then attempting to infect him with smallpox six weeks later. The boy did not develop smallpox, indicating that the earlier exposure to cowpox protected him from infection.
7ro7X TIL that rapper Danny Boy (from House of Pain) loved the book and movie adaptation "The Outsiders" so much that he bought the house from the movie in Tulsa, Oklahoma and turned it into a museum for his personal collection of Outsiders memorabilia
9v9M TIL Before the United States dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan, it showered 35 Japanese cities, including Nagasaki & Hiroshima, with over 5,000,000 leaflets warning Japanese civilians of the impending destruction. (link to leaflet in comments)
oRABY TIL it used to be believed that babies as old as 15 months couldn't feel pain. As a result, doctors would preform surgery without anesthesia. Doctors used muscle relaxants on the infants to prevent squirming, essentially paralyzing the babies for the duration of the procedure.