› added 8 years ago

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TIL some people have “blindsight.” They are blind due to damage in the brain’s visual cortex, but the eye and optic nerve are fine. They can’t consciously see anything but can guess their way through an obstacle course or guess the emotional content of a photo through intuition with decent accuracy.

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wg7o TIL Carl Sagan was brought in to mediate an argument between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke about what the aliens should look like at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Sagan suggested to not show them at all.
YpEAP TIL Jane Kuria and 2 of her 3 children were beaten to death (the son survived) in their home in Boston. They were a family from Kenya who were fleeing female genital mutilation and they were at the time embroiled in the appeals process of asylum. Noone knows who did it.
kOkOB TIL that Guinea worm disease (Dracunculiasis) is likely to be the first parasitic disease to be globally eradicated, and that treatment by slowly extracting the nematode by wrapping it around a stick hasn't fundamentally changed since at least 1550 BCE as described in an Egyptian medical papyrus
wLonE TIL the first studio recording of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" was a version by Pat Boone, released in 1969 a year before Buckley's own version in 1970.
e01n TIL that the USA originally denied that atomic bombs caused lingering radioactivity, calling such claims Japanese propaganda. The New York Times ran an article with the headline “NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN,” citing only military sources and ignoring eyewitness accounts of radiation sickness.