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55

TIL Dr. Seuss adopted his pen name after being caught drinking gin in his room during Prohibition. The dean insisted he resign from the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern magazine where he was editor-in-chief, but he continued writing using the Seuss pseudonym.

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j68XN TIL that 'Cognitive Dissonance' is the mental discomfort experienced when holding 2 conflicting beliefs or values simultaneously. People tend to change one of the conflicting beliefs or acquire new information to reduce the discomfort. Introduced by psychologist Leon Festinger in the 50s.
wL8pY TIL about the Look-and-say sequence, an incremental pattern generated from counting the number of consecutive digits in groups of the same digit.
womD7 TIL about the "Rabbit Test," a human pregnancy test developed in 1931, in which urine from a female human would be injected into a female rabbit. The rabbit would be dissected and if its ovaries were enlarged then the human was likely pregnant (~98% certainty). The test was used into the 1970s.
a8MAA TIL about English as She Is Spoke. Intended as a Portuguese-English translation guide, the author actually had no grasp of English. For help he used a Portuguese-French guide and then a French-English one. The resulting book is a hilarious trainwreck
vPXWR TIL that wealthy farmers in 19th century Britain would commission exaggerated paintings of large livestock as a status symbol, that they were somehow superior to other livestock farmers and breeders.