› added 11 months ago

80

TIL the US Department of Justice sometimes hires "uncompensated" federal prosecutors. According to a WAPO article, to avoid a legal prohibition on providing "voluntary services" to the government, DOJ argues the services aren't voluntary, they're "gratuitous." Most of these unpaid AUSAs are women.

Read more justice.gov

via reddit.com

grVED TIL a computer study of over a million samples of normal English prose found that the longest word one is likely to encounter on an everyday basis is 'uncharacteristically' at 20 letters.
EgKZo TIL Robert A. Wardhaugh, a Canadian historian is known as host of the longest uninterrupted Dungeons & Dragons campaign; going on for 42 years. "Perhaps 3 weeks has been the longest we've ever gone without a session".
XEyrj TIL the Great grey owl is so elusive, it was first "discovered" by Europeans exploring Canada, despite the fact that the species exists in Europe.
a8nlL TIL that during "the Emergency", a political crisis in India which saw civil liberties being curtailed, the newspaper Indian Express protested against ongoing press censorship by publishing a fully blank front page editorial.
a8JQA TIL that in the hours just before and after Arthur C. Clarke's death, five supernovae were observed, a record, with one of them being the farthest object ever seen with the naked eye