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TIL that early in Edgar Allen Poe's writing career, he published an essay exposing a fake chess-playing automaton that was actually operated by a chess master hidden inside. The essay employs a method of deduction called 'ratiocination' which is used by C. Auguste Dupin, Poe's fictional detective.

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YbWA TIL when his teammate died on the pitch due to cardiac arrest, Italian footballer Antonio Di Natale took financial responsibility of his disabled sister as his teammate was her only living relative left.
e0KP6 TIL an article in 1968 revealed widespread marijuana use among US soldiers in Vietnam. As a result of the media uproar stateside and subsequent crackdown by the army, soldiers shifted to heroin, which was odorless and harder to detect. By 1973, up to 20% of the soldiers were habitual heroin users.
b9mXj TIL A statistician spent years writing a science fiction novel to teach university statistics. Even though he didn't know anything about writing fiction, he got an illustrator to create graphic novel strips for his story which contained the equivalent of 60 research papers
6EddW TIL about an outbreak of mass hysteria in Belgium in 1999; hundreds reported cramping, nausea and headaches allegedly from drinking Coca-Cola products. Coca-Cola recalled 30 million products, claiming it had identified the cause of the epidemic. Toxicology experts found no evidence of contamination.
5Ve9P TIL that there are no words in the English language that rhyme with month, orange, silver, or purple