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157

TIL about Xenophon Zolotas, a Greek scholar and politician, who gave two speeches in English to the IMF using nothing but Greek loanwords.

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wg8o TIL the Rosetta Stone was a tax document outlining the tax exempt status of a temple.
165mW TIL that Europeans starting using the term “Aztec” to refer to the people who lived around the city of Tenochtitlan, but that’s not what they called themselves. They referred to themselves as the Mexica.
R5jd9 TIL after Galileo discovered the 4 largest moons of Jupiter, he sought the patronage of the Medici family and proposed naming the moons after their 4 sons. However, the names Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—based on the names of Zeus’ lovers—were later popularized by the astronomer Simon Marius.
dDXQK TIL that in a series of experiments in the 1950s, Solomon Asch asked a group of actors and a single test subject what the longest line was in a "vision test". The actors would intentionally answer incorrectly, causing the subject to also answer incorrectly, despite it being very obvious.
xV45o TIL one of the earliest possible proto-primates looked like an odd rat, and it was given the name "purgatorius."