› added 1 year ago

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TIL that Skinner, the psychologist responsible for operant conditioning (training animals using reward and punishment), also tried to help the WWII war effort by training pigeons to help guide missiles

P1nVO TIL you can have a negative magnitude earthquake. Magnitude calcs are based on logarithmic scale so a ten-fold drop in amplitude decreases the magnitude by 1. If an amplitude of 20 mm as measured on seismic signal corresponds to a magnitude 2 earthquake then 1000 times less (0.02 mm) is mag -1.
wLpRY TIL that QWERTY keyboards were invented to prevent typewriters from jamming. Following its invention, the Dvorak keyboard was introduced and was said to improve typing speed by 5-10% but still is not widely used.
XRnQ TIL: The National Federation of the Blind has a program where Santa will mail braille letters to children who are blind. Parents have until December 16th to request a braille letter from Santa.
0Zdv TIL- Doctor ignaz discovered that by washing his hands between delivering babys cut the mortality rate of infection from 35% to less than 1%. His ideas were rejected by the medical community and upset other doctors so much they put him in a insane asylum. He was beaten to death 14 days later
PYjyE TIL (US-Style) Biscuits are generally of a better quality in the South because they require soft-wheat, which is grown and sold in the South almost exclusively. Soft wheat is better for biscuits but worse for bread - the opposite is true for the hard wheat of the North and West of the US.