› added 5 years ago

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TIL violence spreads through communities in a pattern similar to infectious disease, and interrupting its spread at critical points has lead to dramatic reductions in killings in crime-plagued areas.

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YraW TIL After Russia outlawed virtually all gambling in 2009. A Russian engineer learned how to cheat slot machines. He took his knowledge to the US and won $21,000. Casinos still have no fix for it.
4XpJo TIL that the single oldest complete piece of music is actually from 1400BC. It's known as "Hurrian Hymn No. 6" and an example one can listen to is heavily contested over because it is one of about five "rival decipherments of the notation, each yielding entirely different results".
kJaN7 TIL that nearly 16,000 COVID cases went unreported in England because Public Health England used a legacy .xls Excel spreadsheet file that can only handle up to 65536 rows to record cases instead of a proper database.
e0QAE TIL that Coretta Scott King asked performer Josephine Baker if she would take her husband's place as leader of the Civil Rights movement, but Baker declined. She was also a WWII spy and had a pet cheetah with a diamond collar that ran amok during her performances.
W71N4 TIL about Jørgensen's law: in ancient Greek poetry, characters are usually unaware of the specific actions of the gods, unlike the audience, and thus tend to attribute miracles to "the gods" or "a daimon" or "Zeus."