› added 6 years ago

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TIL that in Uber's 2018 fatal self-driving car accident the system mis-identified the pedestrian and didn't act to avoid the accident. The car's emergency braking system could have acted at the last second, but that system had been disabled.

pY0AQ TIL: Since 2005, when the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act took effect, any citizen can opt out of receiving credit card solicitations by mail permanently. However, there is no option to do it online, you must buy a stamp and mail a physical form.
kO0We TIL the words "Kurds", "Kurdistan", or "Kurdish" were officially banned by the Turkish government. They called them "Mountain Turks" instead. The Kurdish language was also prohibited until 1991.
R5Nll TIL that Marc Bolan of T.Rex ad-libbed the line “Meanwhile, I'm still thinking” at the end of the band’s 1971 song “Bang a Gong (Get It On), because he originally desired to record Chuck Berry’s song “Little Queenie”. The line “Meanwhile, I’m still thinking” came from that Chuck Berry song.
d8PXr TIL that Colin Campbell Ross, an Australian, was executed in 1922 for the murder of a child (a case which was sensationalised by Keith - father of Rupert - Murdoch's newspaper). After the original evidence was tested for DNA in 1998, the case returned to court, and he was finally pardoned in 2008
kOE4B TIL that Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken isn’t a celebration of choice and individuality - It’s actually the opposite. He wrote it sarcastically to make fun of an indecisive friend, and the poem actually asserts that the choice between the “two paths” doesn’t really make a difference at all.