› added 4 years ago

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TIL TIL: Piranhas are mostly scavengers and fairly harmless fish to humans. The reason we think they're rabid flesh eaters is because a bunch of Brazilians played a practical joke on Teddy Roosevelt.

nemMo TIL Grave robbers target confederate soldiers in the United States. Items can be sold at high prices to antique collectors. Button from confederate uniform ($150); full uniforms and medals ($500+); swords used by generals ($20,000+).
N7kl8 TIL After the Watergate scandal broke, Richard Nixon still won the 1972 election by winning 49 out of 50 states for a whopping 520 electoral votes.
xVrR5 TIL that APA Hotel group, one of Japan's substantial hotel chains, have its own CEO author a historical revitionistic book that denies the Nanking Massacre, and having said book be available on every single room in their hotels.
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.
7rdnM TIL about “spreading depolarization”, a scientific phenomena where the human brain continues to emit brain waves after the heart stops, for several minutes even. When Anne Boleyn was beheaded her detached head reportedly tried to talk.