› added 6 years ago

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TIL - A network of men and women working in the legal system have created something called "The Innocence Project" which to date has exonerated 364 innocent people serving sentences for violent crimes with punishments ranging from death to life without parole.

Read more innocenceproject.org

via reddit.com

Ooyxg TIL Rev. Martin Luther King had really bad handwriting, and after his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was smuggled out of jail on scraps of paper, his deputy Wyatt Tee Walker typed it up because he was the only one who could read it
D1P9V TIL that during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, many black citizens, widely believed to be immune to the disease, volunteered to deal with the dead and dying as white citizens fled the city. The immunity seems to have not actually existed, and blacks died at the same rates as whites.
1an0X TIL that JRR Tolkien wrote the Lord of The Rings while he was a visiting English professor at the university in Galway, Ireland. It’s widely believed that the nearby Burren region influenced his depiction of Middle Earth and that “Gollum” was named after a cave in the region called “Poll na gColm”
nbVd TIL another term for an intrusive thought is “The Imp of the Perverse”, a metaphor (popularized / coined by Edgar Allan Poe) for the urge to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation for the sole reason that it is possible for wrong to be done.
0wpMA TIL NASA took Nefertiti the jumping Porscha spider to the ISS to see if she could learn to hunt in zero gravity. She did, and when she returned to earth 110 days later, she successfully retrained her jumps again for 1 g.