› added 5 years ago

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TIL that Chinese newspaper cited The Onion naming the North Korean leader as the Sexiest Man Alive without realizing it was a joke

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LkM6Q TIL that former Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers guitarist Jeff Baxter is also a missile defense consultant for the United States government
b9Kn4 TIL that a large alliance of Native American tribes, the Timucua, consisted of over 200,000 people spread across 35 chiefdoms. They were probably the first Natives Ponce de Leon met in Florida. The nation was wiped out before 1800 and all evidence of religious items and art were burned by explorers.
l7pOa TIL in 1391, Geoffrey Chaucer, famous for the Cantebury Tales, also wrote what is considered the oldest written work in English about an elaborate scientific instrument--"A Treatise on the Astrolabe"
QJaKk TIL A study of robot aesthetics has found non-human-like machines gather positive emotional responses from viewers, while humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble human beings produces feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. This dip in positive responses is called the Uncanny Valley.
W7Gl8 TIL about the Republic of Winston, a county that, during the American Civil War, attempted to secede from the state of Alabama. Their thinking was, " if a state could secede from the Union, then a county could secede from the state."