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TIL Scientists have found that children who learn Mandarin—a tonal language—as babies are more likely to have perfect pitch than those raised to speak English. The finding supports the idea that “babies can acquire perfect pitch as part of learning a language.”

vxV7 TIL that Voltaire saw Canada as being a useless, frozen wasteland and sarcastically referred it as nothing more than “a few acres of snow”.
xABg TIL Jehovah’s Witnesses teach their followers that a woman has to scream for help if she is being attacked by a rapist or she is considered guilty of “fornication”. This applies even if the rapist threatens to kill her if she screams.
gmrA TIL Neil deGrasse Tyson criticized the scene in “Titanic” where Rose looks at the night sky after the ship sank, saying the placement of the stars was inaccurate. After speaking with Tyson, Cameron corrected the scene for the DVD- it was the only scene to be completely redone for the re-release.
EPQW TIL that celibacy of the Catholic clergy began as a means protect the church from having to support the heirs of a deceased priest and prevent them from inheriting church property.
kJARg TIL that before the raid of Osama Bin Laden in 2011, two 1:1 scaled versions of his Pakistani compound were built in the US, for SEALs to practice their raid on. The elevation of these test compounds was also built to be at the same level, to test the affect it would have on the raid helicopters.