› added 4 years ago

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TIL that monkeys in Japan learned to wash sweet potatoes in fresh water to clean them. They later switched to washing sweet potatoes in salt water. It is theorized that this is because they like the salty taste more than plain potatoes.

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via reddit.com

Br4ab TIL Officials in Athens, Greece conducted helicopter & satellite audits to determine less than 0.02% of residents claimed their pools to avoid paying taxes. Greeks consider not paying tax to be ‘Patriotic’, a nod to a time when they were ruled by the Ottoman Turks, almost 200 years ago.
g4b4 TIL that CBS, BET, MTV, CMT, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike, Comedy Central, Logo, Paramount, Showtime, The CW, TV Land, and Simon & Schuster are all owned by one giant media conglomerate.
E7yd TIL that MIT engineer Dennis Klatt synthesised Stephen Hawking’s ‘voice’. Hawking subsequently requested to keep that voice throughout every upgrade of his system.
ANxXB TIL: Eugene Bullard (1895–1961) was the first Black combat pilot, serving in the French Air Service during WWI. An American expatriate, he later became a jazz musician, boxer, and club owner in Paris after escaping Jim Crowe. He used his status in Parisian high society to spy on the Nazis.
Ood9X TIL about “dissimilation.” A linguistic phenomenon where people tend to drop an R if it is in the middle of a word and comes before another syllable that has an R. Ex.“suprise”/“surprise,”/“forward”“forward,” /“catepillar”/“caterpillar,” and “paticular”/“particular.”