› added 3 years ago

91

TIL of the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It's about curious medical cases, including one of a patient with visual agnosia who not only did really mistake his wife for his hat, but also couldn't tell the difference between his shoe and his foot.

d8nlj TIL the earliest known drinking straw dates back to 3000 BC to a Sumerian Tomb and was made out of gold. The Sumerians made straws to drink beer.
YrYr TIL During the campaign of 1920, President Warren G. Harding was accused of making up a word: “normalcy.” When asked if he instead meant “normality,” Harding responded “I have looked for ‘normality’ in my dictionary and I do not find it there. 'Normalcy’, however, I did find, and it is a good word.”
4XvwX TIL that when the Supreme Court of India opened six of the seven secret vaults of Padmanabhaswamy Temple, they discovered $22 billion in treasure including, golden idols, golden elephants and idols wearing 18 foot diamond necklaces, as well as countless bags of gold coins from around the world.
awjYy TIL that the Soviet Union women's rugby team sold smuggled vodka to pay for their 1991 World Cup expenses and Customs didn't issue any enforcement due to a language barrier
BrYeK TIL that in a "computational data-centric analysis" of the most significant figures in history "adjusted for recency bias", Ronald Reagan was ranked 32nd, above Paul the Apostle, Genghis Khan, Thomas Edison, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Freud, Mahatma Gandhi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Galileo, and Buddha