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TIL: Creationism’s monkey-typewriter argument was refuted by a 1980s computer program that randomly generated phrases while preserving the positions of individual letters. The computer wrote Hamlet in just 4.5 days.

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W7eo4 Today I learned, the city of Cleveland released 1.5 million balloons into the air, causing car accidents, the postponement of a Coast Guard search and creating a environmental nightmare on Lake Erie
NX5pM TIL That future US President Lyndon Johnson taught in an all-Mexican-American school in the 1920's, bought the Spanish-speaking janitor an English language book, and tutored the janitor in English on his own time.
pYBRG TIL on 2008, in Douai, France, a bridegroom sued to annul his marriage because the bride wasn't virgin and had lied on the subject. He won in the High Court but lost in appeal
6EQeQ Matter tells space how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move. That's the basic principle behind Einstein's General Relativity, which linked, for the first time, the phenomenon of gravity with that of spacetime and relativity. Place a mass down anywhere in the Universe, and the space around it will curve in response. But if you take that mass away, or move it elsewhere, what causes the spacetime to "snap back" to its unbent position?
yvxJ TIL that horseshoe-crab blood, at $60,000/gallon, is valued to such an extreme degree because it is not only employed worldwide in bacterial contamination tests, it is also used in testings for every single drug approved by the FDA, making it a $50 million/year industry.