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"The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead." DOUGLAS ADAMS
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It is possible to see colours that can't exist, such as blue darker than black or red brighter than white.
Chimerical colours can be produced by staring at one colour until your cone cells are fatigued, and then briefly looking at another, as below.
(Image: Zowie; CC BY.)
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Ethiopian languages have a punctuation mark for sarcasm. It is called ‘temherte slaq’ and looks like an inverted exclamation mark.
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The peregrine falcon has a series of baffles in its nostrils to prevent the air pressure bursting its lungs when it dives.
(Image: Greg Hume)
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There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud. CARL SANDBURG
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A study has shown that birds that live in colder places have smaller beaks. McGill University’s blog published an article about the study with the headline ‘Peckers Get Smaller Where It Gets Colder’.
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Word of the day: JOTTLE (20th century Scots) - to appear busy but not get anything done
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"Of course there are no cat gods. That would be too much like... work." TERRY PRATCHETT
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The Tour de France employs a specialist team to adapt or destroy all images of genitals that people paint on the route.
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Wild honeybees practice social distancing to avoid spreading parasitic mites.
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In 1938, the German army selected Werner Goldberg to appear on recruitment posters as "the ideal German soldier".
Two years later, he was discharged from the army because his father was Jewish.
(Both Goldberg and his father survived the Holocaust.)
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The world's most overdue library book was 287 years overdue when it was returned.
Colonel Robert Walpole borrowed it from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge in 1667.
His biographer found it among his papers, and returned it to the college in 1956.
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In 1982, Key West in Florida declared itself independent of the United States.
After declaring itself independent, the newly formed Conch Republic declared war on the US, surrendered one minute later, and promptly requested one billion dollars in foreign aid from the US.
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In the 1600s, to be depressed was to be in your MUBBLE-FUBBLES.
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Word of the day: HINGUM-TRINGUM (Scots) - low spirits, just barely getting through it all
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The more you *think* you definitely understand more than the experts on a particular issue, the more likely you are to be wrong.
(Paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…)
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When divorcing Aaron Burr, his second wife hired Alexander Hamilton Jr. as her divorce attorney.
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Word of the day: FYLLEANGST (Norwegian) - the unsettling feeling one has the day after drinking when you can’t remember what you did while you were drunk
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A sense of disconnect between what you have objectively achieved and your feelings about it, an inability to see your own success, is called PRODUCTIVITY DYSMORPHIA.
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"We are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was." TERRY PRATCHETT
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It was not uncommon for Victorians to keep hedgehogs as kitchen pets to eat beetles.
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It is perfectly legal to break out of prison in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria.
They believe it is human nature to want to escape from captivity.
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In the USA, there are eleven times as many monuments to mermaids as there are to congresswomen.
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Only one in 15 people who have ever lived are alive now.
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Mount Etna has erupted so much in the last six months, it’s grown about 100 feet (30m).
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves