Post * gMb47 — Curious Curator

› added 5 years ago

1033

TIL Mr. Bean's choir theme song translates to "Behold the man, who is a bean."

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J5pB TIL of Harvard Observatory astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt; given the boring job of examining the luminosity of stars in thousands of photos, she discovered how to measure the distance between the Earth and faraway galaxies. At the time, she was not allowed to operate Harvard’s telescope.

D1lkj TIL Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters are not friends

epkeD TIL about Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, an Ugandan religious movement whose leaders claimed the apocalypse would occur on Dec 31, 1999. When that passed without incident, a new date Mar 17 was announced and a gathering held. There was a fire, killing all 530 attendees.

PY8Vw TIL of "Hickam's dictum," a counterargument to Occam's razor in the medical profession. While Occam's razor suggests to a doctor that she should assume the simplest solution - a single cause for multiple symptoms, Hickam's dictum states: "A patient can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases."

p8vYb TIL: New-born human infants can differentiate between genders, showing a clear preference for females. They're especially attracted to their own mother's face. They're also better at adults when recognizing features on a monkey's face.