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TIL Up to 70% of people will experience a hypnagogic jerk when falling asleep. A hypnagogic jerk is an involuntary muscle spasm that occurs as a person is drifting off to sleep. The phenomenon is so named in reference to the hypnogogic state — the transitional period between wakefulness and sleep.

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7ylM TIL Electricity was introduced to Ethiopia in 1896 after Emperor Menelik II ordered two newly invented electric chairs as a form of humane capital punishment and realized they were useless in his country without electricity
oB1WE TIL because of a 1954 report on illiteracy, Houghton Mifflin's edu director gave Theodor Geisel with a list of 348 words he thought 1st graders should learn, asking Geisel to cut it down to 250 and to use those words to write a book. Geisel returned using 236 of them in his book, The Cat in the Hat.
kJkM5 TIL that as a solo artist, duo, trio, quartet, quintet and musical ensemble, Paul McCartney is the only artist to have reached the top of the UK charts.
4RMJ TIL that a widow of a WWII veteran never learned the exact fate of her husband. After 68 years she found that he was not only buried in France. But that a town in France has been honoring him for the last 68 years.
neEvr TIL In 1974, Johnny Carson requested that NBC stop airing Tonight Show reruns on the weekend as he wanted to save those reruns for the extra vacation days he was planning to take. NBC wanted to fill those slots, so they hired Lorne Michaels to develop a show. That show became SNL.