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TIL an MIT professor found such a strong correlation between essay length and SAT score that “if you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you’d be right over 90 percent of the time.”

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via reddit.com

ejb4 TIL that everyone with blue eyes descended from a single person who lived between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Ag7l TIL that “Fugu”, the Japanese delicacy made from the blowfish, is 200 times more poisonous than cyanide, chefs require a license to cut and serve Fugu, and there have been 23 reported fatalities in Japan since 2000 from eating poorly cut Fugu.
ADlB7 TIL the boardgame "Chutes and Ladders" is based on an Indian game called "Snakes and Ladders." The original game dates back to the 2nd century B.C. and was meant to teach children morality. The snakes symbolized vice, the ladders virtue. Ironically, the game relies entirely on luck, not strategy.
7GrO TIL that in the 1950s a Texas white man went through extensive physical changes to become a black man and travel for six weeks on greyhound buses. After publishing his experiences, he was forced to move to Mexico for several years.
WAaY TIL light in itself isn’t special, it’s just that according to Einstein, the fastest speed reachable in the universe is 300K m/s. It just happens that light is the only thing we detected that travels without limitations in vacuum, which is why we associate the speed limit of the universe with it.