› added 11 years ago

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TIL that the location of the world’s tallest tree, Hyperion, standing at 379 feet, is kept a secret, and is hiding somewhere in California

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kO6v1 TIL about vanity sizing, which is the practice of assigning smaller sizes to clothing to flatter customers and encourage sales. For example, a Sears dress with a 32 inch (81 cm) bust was labeled a size 14 in the 1930s, a size 8 in the 1960s, and a size 0 in the 2010s.
v1nxD TIL that axoltols can regrow limbs, tails, hearts, eyes, parts of the brain, and even the central nervous system.
5YNR9 TIL there's a scale to rate how understandable written communication is, called the Flesch readability score. Corporate jargon ranks low on this scale.
P1bye TIL Alfred Canning surveyed the 1900km Canning Stock Route through the Western Australian desert by capturing and chaining Indigenous people and force feeding them salt - coercing them to show the survey party the way to water. A Royal Commission exonerated the survey party of any wrongdoing.
JYBD8 TIL of Twilight Sleep, a popular childbirth practice that was supposedly pain-free because it erased the memory of the birth by putting the women in a semi-narcotic state. In reality, women thrashed, banged their heads, clawed, screamed, were bound, and laid in their own vomit and waste.