› added 1 year ago

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TIL of the Illusory Truth Effect which is when people will start to believe a lie if they hear it enough times simply because the "familiarity can over power rationality," causing something familiar to feel right.

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wLXwJ TIL the leaves of the Australian Gympie Gympie plant are covered by hollow glass needles filled with a neurotoxin. The sting can last for years and is so exquisitely painful people have killed themselves after being stung.
4a0X TIL that x represents the unknown in Algebra only because there isn’t a ‘sh’ sound in Spanish. The Arabic word شيءٌ (shay'on, literally 'something’) was originally used to denote the unknown in a math equation. It was translated to Chi (X) when the Arabs brought Algebra to Spain.
VBVN0 TIL that in the 1920s, the 'Little Albert Experiment' at Johns Hopkins University conditioned a nine-month-old infant to develop phobias of stimuli like Santa Claus and furry animals.
J1gPj TIL People born in American Samoa, which has been held by the United States for more than 120 years, are not automatically citizens of the United States.
dkQ TIL Jimi Hendrix was kicked out of the 101st Airborne for, among other things, “masturbating in platoon area while supposed to be on detail [sic]”