› added 10 years ago

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TIL that color-blindness in humans happens when a person has two visual processing cones instead of the usual three. There is a flipside, that there are people who have a condition known as Tetrachromacy, where someone has four cones, potentially allowing them to see more of the visible spectrum.

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gMayA Around 1 million people in Ireland—as well as 20,000 people in the United States—can speak Irish. It’s an ancient and unfamiliar-looking language in the Celtic group, making it a linguistic cousin of other ancient languages like Welsh, Scots, Manx, and Breton. To English speakers though, it’s a tough language to master. It has a relatively complex grammar that sees words inflected in an array of different contexts ignored in English. It uses a different word order from English that places the verb, rather than the subject, at the head of the clause. And it uses an alphabet traditionally comprising just 18 letters, so words are often pronounced completely differently from what an English speaker might expect.
BGVd TIL A man named Henry Magee killed a cop who was executing a no knock warrant in Texas. Ultimately, he was not charged (with killing the cop) because he thought someone was breaking into his home. In Texas, you can use deadly force to defend self and property.
8XWX TIL In 1886, 3 people were killed and many more injured in a Texas train company’s publicity stunt. They had invited the public to watch two of their trains crash head-on into one another at full speed, promising a good show.
ddwZ TIL the astronomer most responsible for having Pluto reclassified wrote a memoir about it called “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming”.
M7ZK TIL that we are NOT running out of Helium any time soon.