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TIL The children’s book author of “Goodnight Moon” Margaret Wise Brown died at 42 while showing her doctor how well she felt by kicking up her leg like a can-can dancer; it dislodged a clot in her leg that traveled to her heart, killing her.

WQPL TIL that 160 people were able to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar accurate to .1% when their answers were averaged. Out of 4510 beans, the average guess was 4514. The phenomena is known as wisdom of the crowd.
nWlj7 TIL Often truncated, Oppenheimer's fuller quote was "I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
JY1pk TIL that due to a mistranslation, Muslim martyrs might have 72 white raisins waiting for them in heaven instead of the expected 72 virgins
gGl9 TIL of a study measuring whether the tiredness/hunger of a judge affected the prospects of getting parole. At the beginning of a session, a prisoner had a 65% chance of being parolled, the authors found. This declined to almost zero by the end of a session, and leaped back to 65% after a break.
E15Ko TIL that a Plaque in Plainfield, Indiana marks the spot where a Carriage Driver intentionally drove through a huge mudhole to fling ex-President Martin Van Buren out of the carriage and into the mud. Van Buren had opposed a bill that would have funded improvements to the National Road.