› added 9 years ago

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TIL that Shareef Cousin, a 16 year old who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death (after much prosecutorial misconduct) for a murder he didn’t commit, lost his civil suit against the police and D.A. on the basis that prosecutors have absolute immunity.

W7Zb9 TIL medieval England began adopting the A.D. system in the 8th century, influenced by Saint Bede's work on the dating of Easter and his Ecclesiastical History, with wider adoption across Europe after Charlemagne's 9th-century coronation.
1a6vV Almost nothing looks more orderly than chess pieces before a match starts. The first move, however, begins a spiral into chaos. After both players move, 400 possible board setups exist. After the second pair of turns, there are 197,742 possible games, and after three moves, 121 million. At every turn, players chart a progressively more distinctive path, and each game evolves into one that has probably never been played before.
9YDaG TIL monkeys show signs of both risk aversion and loss aversion, and can be taught to use currency - in experiments with statistically identical outcomes, monkeys performed like humans in preferring to avoid risky transactions, and by putting more weight on losses than on gains
04kp TIL there is a “Redundancy Theory of Truth”, the belief that saying something is true is meaningless; e.g. “It is true that 2+2=4” means the same thing as “2+2=4”. Thus “truth” is a construct of language devoid of meaning. This solves the famous Liar Paradox (“This sentence is false.”)
eZKn TIL that peacocks’ extravagant tailfeathers are an evolutionary disadvantage, because they invite predators. Peahens are attracted to them because any animal with such a clear ‘design flaw’ must have other strong genetic qualities to compensate for it.